SUOMEN ANTROPOLOGI JOURNAL OF THE FINNISH ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY

VOLUME 34 NUMBER 4 WINTER 2009

Editor’s note...... 3

EDVARD WESTERMARCK MEMORIAL LECTURE

Marilyn Strathern Comparing Concerns: Some issues in organ and other donations ...... 5

ARTICLES

Anu Lounela Sovereignty and Violence: Contested forest landscapes in Central Java ...... 22

Anna Tsing Politics, History, and Culture: Comments on Anu Lounela’s “Sovereignty and Violence” ...... 40

Henri Onodera The Kifaya Generation: Politics of change among youth in Egypt ...... 44

FORUM: A DISCUSSION OF JOHN LIEP’S RECENT BOOK, A PAPUAN PLUTOCRACY: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND (2009)

John Liep An Overview of Rossel Island Exchange ...... 65

Joel Robbins Equality, Inequality, and Exchange ...... 71 SUOMEN ANTROPOLOGI • JOURNAL OF THE FINNISH ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY

VOLUME 34 NUMBER 4 WINTER 2009

Chris Gregory On the Ranking of Shells and People ...... 81

Ton Otto Exchange and Inequality, Time and Personhood ...... 91

John Liep Response to Comments ...... 99

BOOK REVIEWS AND CRITICAL ESSAYS

Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills and Mustafa Babiker (eds). African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice ...... 113 Timo Kallinen

Pamela L. Geller and Miranda K. Stockett (eds). Feminist Anthropology: Past, Present, and Future ...... 116 Tuulikki Pietilä

Walker, Anthony R. (ed.). Pika-Pika: The Flashing Firefly. Essays to Honour and Celebrate the Life of Pauline Hetland Walker (1938–2005) ...... 121 Clifford Sather

Edson, Gary. Shamanism: A Cross-Cultural Study of Beliefs and Practices ...... 124 Jan Svanberg

Wynn, Peter Kirby (ed.). Boundless Worlds: An Anthropological Approach to Movement ...... 127 Annika Teppo

NEWS

Finnish Africanist’s Work Gets International Recognition: Tuulikki Pietilä receives the 2009 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize ...... 130 Timo Kallinen

Publications Received ...... 131

Information for Contributors...... 132 FORUM A DISCUSSION OF JOHN LIEP’S RECENT BOOK, A PAPUAN PLUTOCRACY: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND (2009)

· JOHN LIEP, JOEL ROBBINS, CHRIS GREGORY, TON OTTO ·

In September 2009 a group of scholars met at Aarhus University, Copenhagen, for the defence of Mag. Scient. John Liep’s doctoral thesis, published by Aarhus University Press under the title, A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island (2009). The book is the first full-scale modern ethnography of the well-known shell money system on Rossel Island—one of the most complex such systems on record. Liep’s ethnography is very powerful, but more than that, the book is built around an ambitious and unusual critique of notions of reciprocity and the gift economy that are of great general importance. Liep’s three examiners were Joel Robbins, Chris Gregory and Ton Otto. In light of the depth of debate that marked the occasion of the defence, there was a general feeling that the discussion deserved a wider forum. The result is the texts that are published together here.

JOHN LIEP. A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009. Pp. 376. ISBN: 978-87-7934-446-4

AN OVERVIEW OF ROSSEL ISLAND EXCHANGE

· JOHN LIEP ·

In the enchanted archipelagos east of New Guinea known as the Massim by anthropologists, remote Rossel Island is the last outpost facing the trade wind from the southeast. Its 4,000 inhabitants diverge from the rest of the Massim peoples by speaking an extremely difficult Papuan language. They thus represent the last remnant of the autochthonous population that peopled the Massim islands before the invasion of Austronesian immigrants into the region some two thousand years ago. In some respects Rossel culture differs from that of the Austronesian-speaking societies to the west but Austronesian influence is also marked, notably in matrilineal descent and in the exchanges of valuables of shell and greenstone that permeate the social life of the Rossel Islanders. Ranked exchange of shell decorations is well known from the Massim kula but the hierarchy of Rossel Island money is outstanding by virtue of its extraordinary complexity. The question is thus posited of the derivation of such an objectified hierarchy in an island otherwise characterised by the absence of descent group ranking, and with what, on the face of it, seems to be a common Melanesian big man system. It is my hunch that this shell hierarchy and the ranked financial operations in which it is activated must be understood in connection with the wider Austronesian environment in the Massim.

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A majority of students of Pacific prehistory now agree that the Austronesians who entered Melanesia some 3,500 years ago had a hierarchical social organisation with chiefs, nobles and commoners. In Polynesia and Micronesia, which were settled only by Austronesians, their hierarchies survived and expanded. But in western Melanesia, where the invaders mixed with Papuan populations, they devolved into so-called egalitarian big man systems although there are traces of hierarchy in many places. This is also the case in the Massim. I believe that the ranked system of exchange on Rossel is a legacy from a time when the island was in articulation with Austronesian hierarchical formations to the west. In the prologue of my book I therefore describe the Massim as a background to Rossel Island. I analyse Trobriand hierarchy and asymmetric exchange and I trace remnants of hierarchy in decomposed forms in the rest of the archipelago. I do not want to give only a synchronic analysis of an isolated island society. I speculate on pre-historic formations and transformations far back in time and account for colonial and post-colonial changes in history. Further, my understanding of Rossel exchange has profited by comparison with other systems of ranked exchange in Indonesia and the Pacific. My aim has been to widen the scope of analysis in time and in space from Rossel Island as a small Papuan outlier in an Austronesian sea. The bulk of my book is of course concerned with explicating Rossel Island society and the complex system of ranked exchange that permeates the social life of its people. Part one sets out the general background. I first present the colonial history of the island. I then zoom in on the village of Pum on the north coast of Rossel that has been my base during my periods of fieldwork. I describe settlement history, the clan system and the importance of cognatic kinship. The following chapters outline dimensions of power, the positioning of women and domains of economic life. Part two is the detailed exposition of ranked exchange on Rossel Island. I describe the two types of shell money and the other kinds of valuables and go on to analyse institutions of exchange: bridewealth and mortuary exchanges—which both constitute important moments in the cycle of social reproduction— the complicated pig feast and remaining forms of payment. Chapter Ten—‘The rules and practice of ranked exchange’—is a grand attempt to interpret the various financial operations that allow ranked payments to be launched and the strategies which participants employ. In the epilogue I argue that ranked exchange on Rossel produces a social stratification where a minority of big men dominate the rest of the people through their monopoly of high-ranking shells and superior skill in operating exchange. Joel Robbins provides a summary of Rossel shell money exchange in his following contribution. I shall therefore present only a selective outline of it from my own perspective.

Shell money exchange on Rossel Island1

There are some twenty ranked classes of ndap (shell money) in which I distinguish three divisions: the very high, the high and the low division. Every ndap rank has a name and each ndap in the two upper divisions also has its own individual name. These shells are all owned permanently by individual big men (and some women) and are only transferred in inheritance. Shells in the very high division, which were formerly used to pay for cannibal victims, are now out of circulation and have a very special position: they are lent out to

66 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND appear as the most valuable objects in exchange rituals, but only for a short time. Then they must return to their owners again. This of course gives the owners of these shells influence on the timing of exchange rituals. Big men also appear at these exchanges as expert directors and witnesses. The high-ranking shells serve as a license to authorize the occasion. When the person who receives such a shell gives it back again he receives a large payment of low ranking ndap instead. This is a replacement for the big shell he cannot keep. The shells of the high division are thus a prime example of Annette Weiner’s (1992) concept of “inalienable possessions” and of “keeping-while-giving”. The actual circulation of ndap in exchange among people on Rossel thus takes place with ndap in the low division. The kê shell money also has many ranks, but almost to the top of the system they may still be transferred in exchange. Yet, also here a displacement of value may take place. Big kê are often withdrawn after having been transferred for some time to a recipient when the former owner demands them back again. This is not always agreed upon on beforehand. The recipient is then put off with a lower ranking kê as a substitute. A big kê may sometimes be replaced with a payment of lower-ranking shells but this happens only rarely. More frequently the recipient, if he is not strong, will have to be content with the substitution. Big kê are thus in principle transferable in exchange, but they are often withdrawn again. These operations give rise to a lot of bickering among people about the greed and deviousness of the big men. This arrangement of pro forma participation in exchange of high-ranking objects and their subsequent withdrawal and substitution or replacement by low ranking shells is unique to Rossel.2 This greatly complicates exchange on Rossel and makes it a more difficult example from which to study ranked exchange. But if a theory can make sense of the most difficult case it should be able to explain the simpler ones. I see two main results of my research in this book. First, I have established that there is a general form of exchange I call ranked exchange. Second, I propose an alternative approach to exchange that challenges key assumptions of exchange theory: the principle of reciprocity and the theory of the gift.

Ranked exchange

First of all, this is characterized by ‘ranked money’. Modern money is first and foremost an instrument of market exchange. It measures value as a quantity, a price. There is a common denominator: the crown, or the euro, or the dollar. We may compare all things in the market in terms of this single unit. In this way we may know the price of everything and the value of nothing, as the saying goes. A ranked currency, on the other hand, measures value as a quality. It denotes the worth of persons and things. This is because ranked money is not a price-making instrument in a market economy. It is a symbolic standard for displaying social distinction, and at the same time it is a means of payment for valuable things. High-ranking monies are rare and personalized treasures, each with its own name. They are surrounded by an aura of the sacred and imbued with myth and history (Weiner 1992). Low-ranking monies are more common and anonymous pieces. A ranked system of money thus measures worth on a scale from the sacred down to the profane. High-ranking money is like our orders and medals. Low-ranking money is more like our notes and coins.

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I have traced ranked money from Indonesia out into the Pacific to New Guinea and the Melanesian islands, to Palau in Micronesia, and to Samoa and Tonga in Polynesia. In eastern Indonesia it may be brass gongs, elephant tusks or gold ornaments. In Palau it is antique glass beads. In Melanesia it is usually some form of shell money. In Samoa it is finely woven mats and in Tonga it is mats and bark cloth. The money stuff thus varies a lot, but this should not make us overlook the common features of these systems. These societies are all in the orbit of the Austronesian migrations. In these systems ranked money invariably plays an essential role in exchanges concerned with social reproduction: exchange rituals at birth, marriage and death between groups of people related through marriage. Through these exchanges rights and obligations between people as kinsmen and affines are addressed, negotiated or severed. They address rights in spouses and children, rights of residence and use rights to land. These recurrent flows of currency (and also of food and stimulants) between people through generations are thus the ‘blood circulation’ of social reproduction. Moreover, ranked money appears in payments when titles of nobility are conferred and they pay for status symbols such as big canoes and houses. Formerly, these monies could also in various places be used in payments to murderers to kill people, to head-hunters to take people’s heads, or to acquire girls for prostitution. The ranked money of Rossel Island could even pay for victims of cannibalism. Ranked exchange is not something of the past, taking place in some anthropological terrarium. Kinship exchanges in many of these societies have expanded enormously. They still involve ranked money as well as foodstuffs and pigs. But in most places they have also absorbed trade goods and modern money. This is not the case on Rossel Island however. Here, the big men have had the power to uphold a ban on modern money and commodities in bridewealth and mortuary exchanges. Most of the societies with ranked exchange I have mentioned are also societies with a hierarchical social organisation, although Rossel is not. They have ranked classes of nobles and commoners and they have political systems of chieftainship. In these societies it is nobles who own and exchange high-ranking money largely between themselves. (They also operate with lower ranking money.) Commoners only exchange lower-ranking mo- ney. High-ranking money is only sparingly parted with in very important payments while low-ranking money flows more easily in greater quantity. In payments monies of different rank are typically combined. Such ‘scaled payments’ thus display distinctions of the social rank of donors and recipients. I have said that ranked money represents value as a quality, not a quantity. There is no common denominator. Ranked monies of different value are therefore difficult to compare in exchange. This makes ranked exchange a complicated game to operate. In these societies a number of financial procedures have evolved in order to build trust, to effect loans and honour debt, and to carry out exchanges. There are procedures I call solicitary gifts, security, pledge, deposit and replacement. These are all subsidiary exchanges where the movement of lesser valuables enables the release of high rank valuables in exchange. I have only the space here to discuss one of them: the pledge.

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Critique of gift theory

During my fieldwork it was difficult enough to untangle the strange features of the high- ranking ndap and kê shells, the withdrawals, replacements and substitutions. Another thing was the contradictory statements I recurrently seemed to get from my informants. People would tell me that that if they ‘helped’ someone collecting shells for some payment they had a right to get their shells back some time later. For good low-ranking ndap and higher- ranking kê this usually takes place in the form of a ‘loan’ where a lower ranking shell is given as a pledge from the borrower to the lender. I was told that on presentation of this pledge later on by the lender to the borrower, the latter should return the original shell or he should find another one of similar or even better value. But I was also told that from the perspective of the borrower, “he cannot think about that man [the lender]; he has the pledge, [the borrower] may let him ‘float’”. The Rossel word ngm:aa, which I call pledge, in fact means ‘to dodge’, as one sidesteps to avoid something thrown after one. There is a way to try and regain one’s value by lending the pledge to a third person, a good friend, who promises to return a better shell. By doing this a couple of times people hope that they may end up with a shell even better than the original one that was ‘lost’. But often they do not succeed in this game and end up losing even the pledge. “To take is not to give” as Shakespeare said in another context (Richard III, Act 1, Scene 2). These contradictions troubled me for a long time. I was unable to understand them by means of the prominent anthropological theories of exchange. First, there is Malinowski’s principle of reciprocity (1926) which says that the reciprocal give-and-take of gifts between two parties is the basis of social structure. These gifts and countergifts balance in the long run and sustain symmetry in the whole system of mutualities. Second, there is Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift (1990 [1923–24]): in archaic societies, as he said, there is a moral obligation to repay gifts fairly. This even induces people to be generous because the generous giver rises in people’s esteem while the close-fisted sinks. The principle of reciprocity in gift giving would ensure that wealth would be fairly shared in a population and that transactors would remain equal. Such dogmas went well with beliefs that Melanesian and other ‘primitive’ societies were in essence egalitarian. I think that these ideas were part of a utopian stream in anthropology where ‘noble savages’ walk on as extras in our own dream plays about blissful societies. I could not get a handle on Rossel exchange with these theories. Then it dawned on me that things would look different if I changed my perspective. As Sherlock Holmes said, “I came to the conclusion that I must approach the case from another aspect (…) everything which had been disconnected before began at once to assume its true place” (Doyle 1989 [1893]): 382–84). I had started out with the assumption that exchanges took place between actors that were equal and that exchanges in themselves should sustain that equality. If I realized that actors were always already involved in relations that were as often as not unequal and that differences of power were regularly at play among exchangers I could understand these seeming contradictions. People were not equal: they were seniors and juniors, men and women, big men and lesser men. A loan might not be freely given but could be a contribution from a person under pressure. A debt was not something invariably to be honoured. It could be evaded. People were not always in agreement about the fairness of an individual transaction or about the whole organisation of exchange. Exchanges did not conform to some just principle of reciprocity. They were

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 69 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND negotiated by actors in different power positions. This is my second accomplishment in this book: a challenge to a central part of the anthropological canon. Rossel is a very ‘monetarized’ society in terms of the shell money. The cycle of social reproduction is permeated with shell exchanges and walled off from the world of modern money and commodities. Pig feasts involve complex mobilisations of shell money. Big men pay for the construction of large houses and canoes. Even some forms of labour may be paid with shells. There is a class-like stratum of big men who own and operate the high- ranking shells. They dominate exchange rituals and they exert considerable influence over the rest of the population. I have therefore dared to call this regime a plutocracy.

NOTE

It is an honour that the Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society has dedicated space to critical debate about the content of my book. I have fond memories of the occasions when I have had the opportunity to develop my ideas on exchange for discussion during visits in Helsinki and I am happy that I at long last can discuss the final result of my researches here.

NOTES ...... 1 In addition to the shell money, valuables such as ceremonial greenstone axes, ceremonial lime spatulae and various kinds of shell necklaces appear in exchanges on Rossel Island. There is no space to discuss them here. 2 This was not always so. Formerly, high-ranking shells were actually transferred in exchanges. When a house fire (during the time of the First World War) destroyed many valuable shells this caused a financial crisis and a collapse of trust among the big men. Those in possession of high rank shells held on to them and the present arrangement is the result.

REFERENCES ...... Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 1989 [1893]. The Crooked Man. In The Original Illustrated Strand Sherlock Holmes. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. Weiner, Annette B. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw 1926. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mauss, Marcel 1990 [1923-24]. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Arhaic Societies. London: Routledge.

JOHN LIEP, Dr. Scient. EMERITUS LECTURER IN ANTHROPOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN [email protected]

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EQUALITY, INEQUALITY, AND EXCHANGE COMMENTS ON A PAPUAN PLUTOCRACY: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND

· JOEL ROBBINS ·

In hindsight, once an anthropologist has published a successful ethnography, it often looks as if they have been extremely lucky in their choice of a society to study. How fortunate for Margaret Mead, for example, that she happened upon a group of Pacific Islanders who handled adolescence in an almost perfectly inverse way to North Americans. And the gods must have been smiling on Evans-Pritchard when they put him down among the Nuer, who turned out to be the most elegantly politically ordered stateless society on earth. And someone must have been looking out for Roy Rappaport too, when they led this budding ecological anthropologist to the Maring, a group of people whose elaborate pig killing rituals just happened to keep their populations in perfect homeostatic balance with their surrounding environment. Great anthropologists almost always seem to get just what they need by way of ethnographic circumstances to help them push forward the theoretical line they want to develop. I mention that good ethnographies appear after the fact to be based on good fortune because John Liep looks for all the world like one of those lucky types for whom this generalization holds true. Interested in economy and exchange, he found his way to Rossel Island, where people happen to operate what from some angles has to be seen as the most complex currency system in the world, one that turns on 34 different, ranked kinds of currency tokens, not counting state money, and that features a welter of more or less unusual ways of moving those currencies around between people in transactions that shape marriages, funerals, and almost all of the other most important social institutions of Rossel Island life. As Liep (p. xviii)1 puts matters, the complexity of the Rossel Island currency system makes it “an anthropological freak”—the kind of one-off limit case in the range of global variation that so often provides the materials for ethnographic success stories. What better basis than fieldwork among the Rossel Islanders could there be, then, for making pointed interventions into disciplinary debates about the nature of exchange? Of course, anyone who has actually carried out ethnography knows that ethnographers don’t really get lucky in their fieldsites, rather, they very much have to make their own luck by shaping what they find wherever they land into arguments the discipline can come to care about. It took a Margaret Mead to see the critical potential in differences between Samoan and North American ways of handling adolescence, just as it took scholars with the genius of Evans-Pritchard and Rappaport to make the Nuer and the Maring seem like they offered important answers to such pressing anthropological questions. Liep too, I would argue, made this kind of good luck for himself. Ever since the 1920s, when Wallace Armstrong had published several works on Rossel currencies on the basis of his very short- term fieldwork on the island, anthropologists had known that the case was out there. But before Liep went in 1971, no aspiring or seasoned fieldworker seemed to see the potential in going back to Rossel for major research, or at least not enough potential to make up for the downsides: the impossibly difficult language, the fact that unlike many of their neighbors, the Rossel islanders did not kula, etc. So as easy as it all looks in hindsight, we have to give

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Liep great credit for making his own luck in Rossel, luck that has led to the work I will discuss here: A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island. As the title at least implies, this is a book woven of two main threads. The dominant one, and the strongest, is announced in the subtitle: “Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island”. This thread consists in a detailed account of the ranked currencies in use on Rossel Island and the nature of the exchanges into which they enter. This part of the book is beautifully done. In light of its publication, the anthropological record as regards what is possible by way of human creativity in developing currency systems has changed in such a way that it will never quite be the same. I have no quibble with this account and will do no more with it here than provide a brief and appreciative summary. The second thread is woven around the first, and although it provides the book with its main title—“A Papuan Plutocracy”—it is more of a consistent background theme in the book than its major focus. This thread takes up the role of leaders in Rossel Island society, examining how their power is both grounded in, and decisively shapes, the system of ranked exchange. Though developed in a less sustained way than the discussion of the exchange system itself, this theme is crucial for the book as a whole, for it carries the load of what Liep presents as a major critique of anthropological theories of exchange more generally—a critique aimed at correcting Malinowski, Mauss and all those who have followed them in developing models of what anthropologists have come to call gift economies or systems of gift exchange. If Liep’s broader argument about the nature of reciprocity and ‘gift economies’ is correct, it would fundamentally alter how anthropologists think about gift exchange. Since the stakes of this second aspect of Liep’s work are so high, it is the one I will want to wrestle with more carefully in what follows. Before turning to Liep’s argument about politics and the shortcomings of anthropological work on the gift, let me provide a very quick sketch of the Rossel currency system that he describes so productively. Rossel Islanders are possessed of two distinct currencies made from sea shells. One kind of currency, called ndap, is made from Spondylus shells that have been ground and polished. The other, called kê, is made from the shells of the bivalve called Chama imbricata. Ndap shells are the most important and there exist twenty ranked categories of them, running from the ‘biggest’ at the top of the hierarchy to the ‘smallest’ at the low end. ‘Big’ and ‘small’ are the Rossel Islanders’ own descriptive terms for the scale on which the types of shells are arranged. It is important to recognize that these terms refer to something like a quality of value that inheres in shells of a given category, not to their size. At least in theory, no number of small shells can add up to one large one, the same way three third place finishes don’t add up to one first place one. The smaller shells are simply possessed of a different kind of value than the big ones, and this is why there are twenty different ranks. To bring some further analytic resolution to the hierarchy of ndap shells, Liep groups their twenty categories into three divisions he labels very high, high, and low. These groupings are based on how the shells are used in exchange. Ndap in the very high division are not used in exchange anymore and belong permanently to their owners. High division ndap make complex, temporary appearances in exchanges, but they are also their owners’ inalienable possessions and do not permanently change hands. Low division ndap, by contrast, do circulate in exchange and move between different owners. After getting one’s mind around the complexity of the ndap series, one might be relieved to find that there are only fourteen ranked categories of kê, and that Liep groups them only

72 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND into high and low divisions. Only members of the single highest category of kê do not circulate in exchange, though people often try to retrieve other high ranking kê they have given in exchange through special kinds of claims they can make on their recipients to accept a lower ranking substitute for the kê they originally received. As complex as the hierarchies of ndap and kê are in themselves, the outline I have provided thus far is quite simple by comparison with the level of detail needed to present a full-blown picture of the currency system in action. Rather than attempt to offer such a picture here, I want only to indicate a few of the features of the operation of the system that play important roles in Liep’s account of how the system of ranked exchange is tied up with the system of political power on Rossel. The first of these features is that it is primarily big men who own the ndap of the very high and high categories. This weight of this fact is increased greatly when one recognizes that shells of the high category must play some role “in all major ceremonial exchanges, such as bridewealth, pig feasts, house or canoe payments” (p. 179). The role they play in such exchanges is necessary, but it is also very brief. In each instance of one of these exchanges, a high ranking ndap shell is given to the person destined to receive the payment involved— the representative of the bride’s family in bridewealth, the pig owner in the pig feast, and those who labored to build a house or canoe in house or canoe payments. Soon after the high ranking ndap is given, however, it is taken back and returned to the big man who owns it, only to be replaced with a number of low-ranking shells that constitute the final payment to the recipient. Because it is primarily big men who have high-ranking shells, and because anyone who wants or needs to engage in a ceremonial exchange is required to use one of these shells to initiate the payment process in this way, people require the help of big men to accomplish their goals. In return for meeting such needs, big men receive vegetable food, in some cases pork, and are also sometimes able to appropriate low ranking shells in exchange. Beyond the need for an inalienable, high ranking shell to appear in a given exchange, people involved in ceremonial exchange generally have to put together what Liep calls ‘scaled payments’ made of specified numbers of shells of varying ranks in order to present payments of the appropriate form. As I understand it, to make these payments, people need to amass numbers and kinds of shells that most people cannot put together using only those they have in their own collections. They thus need to solicit some of these shells from others in their networks, and often they turn to big men for help with this task. As importantly, to gather shells from others they need to engage in a number of more or less exotic ‘financial procedures’ that mark exchange on Rossel. Of these, let me mention just three, two of which are central to Liep’s arguments about power and exchange. The first two are the ones involving the use of a ‘security’ and of a ‘pledge’. When eliciting a high- ranking ndap or kê to present in an exchange, sometimes a person will leave the person who provides it with a security shell or shells of greater value than that borrowed (though of greater value, these shells will not be of the right kind to use in the exchange that is being prepared). Since such high-ranking shells are not given irrevocably in exchange, they will be returned and the security reclaimed. At other times, however, the person who asks for a shell will not give a security, but will only offer a ‘pledge’. A pledge is a lower ranking shell that owner of the higher-ranking shell keeps to prove his claim on the loaned shell he expects to get back. The rub in this arrangement is that the person making the loan does

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 73 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND not always receive his shell back. Borrowers who feel they can get away with it often forgo making the return, leaving the lender only with the smaller pledge shell. As Liep puts it, in such cases “credit and honouring debts are subject to the balance of power between participants” (p. 309). Put otherwise, big men often manage to come out ahead in transactions in which they have given a pledge because they are able to avoid making the appropriate return. The third financial procedure I want to mention here is ‘substitution’. Substitution is what happens when one takes back an inalienable, high-ranking ndap from a recipient and gives in return some smaller shells. With high ranking ndap, it is expected from the outset that this reduced substitution will take place—it is written into the rules of ceremonial exchange on Rossel that a high ranking ndap must both appear to be given in ceremonial exchange and then be taken back to be replaced with a substitute payment. Young people may resent the extent to which this rule allows big men to hold on to the most valuable shells, but at least its operation is not a surprise. For all but the very highest rank of kê shells, by contrast, the rules in play are different. Alienation of most kê shells is possible and people have the right to hope they will be able to keep the kê they have been given. This is particularly the case for a person who has held a pig feast and been given kê as payment for pork. Yet even in the case of kê that can be permanently given, months or even years later their original owners can ask to have them back for some specified purpose related to making another exchange. When the original owner takes back his kê, he generally replaces it with the pledge of the kê. In this kind of substitution, Liep again sees the play of power—for the stronger a person is, the more likely he is to be able to ask for such returns successfully and to resist requests that he return kê he himself has received. As Liep puts it, “Exchange on Rossel takes place in a social field where gifts, obligations, debts and credits are subject to the alignments of power between the parties. Recipients must accept the reduction if they are not able to muster the power to withstand it” (p. 317). Big men again tend to come out the winners in this kind of transaction—leaving younger and less powerful people to resent a situation they appear unable to prevent. Thus far we have seen that the ceremonial economy is central to Rossel Island sociality— it permeates important areas of social life such as marriage, pig exchange, death payments, and payments for the labor that goes into making houses and canoes. Furthermore, the ceremonial economy is a ranked economy, with a few shells possessed of value far beyond that of others. Since big men tend to control these shells, they also dominate the economy in which the shells move. Taken together, these facts lead Liep to declare Rossel a plutocracy, a society ruled by its wealthiest citizens. This is an unusual claim for an anthropologist to make about a Melanesian society. Melanesians are generally represented as more or less egalitarian, or at least as egalitarian in some important respects, and as marked by constantly shifting political fields in which power relations are fluid and even the most successful leaders achieve their power only through constant work and are always as apt to lose as to augment it. There is little room, in this classic Melanesian view of political life, for people to attain stable hierarchical rank and to govern society with the kind of commanding hand that a notion like plutocracy suggests. Liep acknowledges that his image of a group of leading men possessed of stable rank above their fellows and able to bend the social system to their own ends is not a standard

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Melanesian one. It is, in fact, in light of the anomalous status of the Rossel system as he reads it, that Liep offers a very provocative historical argument to account for how Rossel Island society came to have its hierarchical structure. His argument is that Rossel Island society was deeply influenced by the Austronesian settlers who came to the region several thousand years ago from South China or Taiwan. These settlers brought with them full- blown hierarchical social systems quite different from those possessed by the autochthonous Papuans they encountered, whose societies looked much more like the stereotypical Melanesian ones I described above. The Rossel Islanders speak a Papuan language, rather than one of the Austronesian languages spoken by their nearest neighbors. But they otherwise show some distinctly Austronesian features, such as matrilineal clanship. Liep’s argument, then, is that their contact with their Austronesian neighbors bequeathed to Rossel Islan- ders a hierarchical social system that most likely replaced an originally more Papuan one. As has been the case throughout Austronesian speaking Melanesia for reasons that need not detain us here, since its establishment, the Rossel Island hierarchical system has been devolving over time, until we now see mostly only faint echoes of its original hierarchy. But what is left of that system of rank shows up in the power of Rossel Island big men, and it is rooted in a hierarchical currency system that we can imagine would have some time in the past mirrored an even more obviously hierarchical social order. Liep’s historical hypotheses are bold ones. In making them, he resourcefully draws on recent archaeological and linguistic work on the Austronesian settlement of the Pacific. Although these hypotheses are impossible to prove with certainty, Liep’s argument as a whole is plausible and is articulated with a level of clarity that will allow it to serve as the origin-point for future debate (which I take to be the primary measure of success for such speculative reconstructions). I thus bring up this historical argument not to criticize it, but to point out the extent to which it informs Liep’s entire ethnography. On the basis of it, Liep has no difficulty seeing the main story of Rossel Island society as turning on the fact that it is in significant respects a hierarchical one that affords its few leaders enough of a fund of power that they can exercise real control over social life. And this is where my own voice comes in. For it is on the basis of this general picture of Rossel Island social life that Liep launches his broad critique of key aspects of anthropological exchange theory, and these critiques, and the extent to which the Rossel Island data supports them, are the matters I want to pursue through some questions here. Let me quickly review Liep’s criticisms of exchange theory. In the first criticism he follows Weiner (1992) in suggesting that the standard Maussian view of exchange does not take into account the finding that some things are defined precisely by the fact that they are not to be given, but are rather to be kept as inalienable possessions that anchor the identity and social standing of those who keep them. On this model, the keeping of things turns out to be as important to the construction of social life as the exchange of them. High-ranking ndap and the highest ranking kê—objects that are never really given away in exchange—make this point with great clarity. I therefore have no critical bone to pick with Liep’s basic point here. But I have to say I have always wondered at the extent to which the point about the existence of things that are not given is really so foreign to Mauss, for it was Mauss himself in his work on sacrifice, written before that on the gift, who defined sacrifice as a kind of exchange in which someone “gives up something of himself but does not give himself” in his totality (Hubert and Mauss 1964: 100), indicating that it is possible

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 75 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND to think about keeping, even under the rubric of exchange. Still, the new emphasis on what is kept opened up by Weiner’s work has been of undoubted importance and Liep shows again how useful such an emphasis can be. But Liep also has two other problems with Maussian exchange theory, and these are destined to be more controversial. The first, and most important, takes the form of a rejection of the principle of reciprocity. On Liep’s reading (which is here again similar to one of Weiner’s), both Malinowski and Mauss were unduly influenced by the market economy in asserting that people felt an obligation to give back a return for what they were given, and to have that return be roughly equivalent in value to what they had received (pp. 6–8). The Rossel case, he asserts, gives the lie to the putative universality of this principle, since on Rossel big men and those who hope to attain this status regularly aim to give less than they receive, or to engineer, as in the case of pledges, not to follow through on reciprocal obligations at all. And contrary to the expectations of standard exchange theory, not only do big men behave in such non-reciprocal ways, but they do so with no loss of status. Liep’s second critical concern beyond that of inalienability is with what he takes to be an anthropological assumption that in gift economies there exists “a general disposition of actors towards generosity”. Again, Rossel big men with their keeping-while- giving and constant scheming to come out ahead do not seem to fit the bill, leading Liep to reject generosity as a universal feature of these kinds of systems of exchange (p. 323). One could challenge Liep’s criticisms of the principles of reciprocity and generosity on the level of theory. It is arguable, for example, that the architects of exchange theory did not completely neglect hierarchy and the way it can be expressed in practices of returning something other than what is given—the tradition of analysis these pioneers founded at least went on to take account of such phenomena. And it is almost certain that no one who spoke of a propensity toward generosity in gift economies did so in the kind of naïve fashion Liep seems to imagine they did; rather than claiming that people living with such economies were simply open handed, in speaking of generosity anthropologists were making points about how in the logic of such systems it is impossible to make anything of oneself unless one is constantly giving things away. The goal of such theoretical critiques of Liep’s arguments would be to preserve some version of exchange theory that did not reduce to Liep’s own conclusion, one that holds that the most important thing we can say about exchange in places like Melanesia is that it “is played out in a social field of inequality, and that status and power differences are realized and negotiated in exchange processes” (p. 323). In a general sense, there is no doubting the truth of this, but if this is all there is, it is not clear that we have avoided reproducing a Western social ontology of struggle, violence and domination, nor that the market logic Liep sees as so perniciously influencing classical exchange theory has not infected his own vision even more profoundly. But such theoretical debates are never settled, nor even properly launched, without recourse to excellent ethnographic materials, and with that in mind I would like to return to Liep’s own superb ethnography and suggest that his model of exchange as all about power, advantage and hierarchy might not exhaust what can be said even about the Rossel case. That is to say, I want to try to analyze Rossel Island as much more ‘traditionally’ Melanesian in its ‘political’ and ‘economic’ structures than Liep claims it is, and then to consider what kinds of new questions such an analysis can pose about the currency system that makes Rossel such an anthropologically noteworthy place.

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As a kind of shorthand expression of the idea that guides my rereading of the Rossel materials, I might start by saying that in many respects Liep’s ethnography is written from the point of view of the system of ranked exchange itself, or at least from the point of view of that system as seen through the eyes of the big men who are its central actors. The shell money system itself is indisputably hierarchical in its design—if all we knew about Rossel was that it featured this overly-elaborated system of ranked currencies, we would have to conclude that it was probably a very hierarchical society indeed. If we added to our knowledge the way the big men engage the system by holding on to the biggest valuables even as they insist that everyone needs to use them to get anything done in the realm of ceremonial exchange, and by trying whenever they can to exploit the weaknesses of others by welching on returns and taking back previous gifts, our sense of a stratified social order would only increase. Liep’s main arguments depend on foregrounding precisely these two features of Rossel Island society. But there are plenty of hints in Liep’s ethnography that a story told from the point of view of the shell money system itself and the big men’s ideal view of it is not the only story one can tell about Rossel social life. There is, in fact, a much more ‘egalitarian’ side of things that complicates that story significantly. ‘Egalitarian’ is of course an essentially contested term. Or perhaps even this designation is too kind. Since the 1980s, the idea has largely settled in amongst anthropologists that all inequalities are real and have decisive effects on social life and that conversely all claims to equality are merely ideological and mostly honored in the breach. Thus the contest over egalitarianism has already come near to ending in favor of the abandonment of the term. Yet in spite of the strength of this tendency in contemporary anthropology, I think one can argue against abandoning the idea of an egalitarian society, and I have even done so elsewhere (Robbins 1994). But that is not what I want to do here. Instead, in the service of getting my argument aired, I want just to ask that for the sake of argument we agree to mean by egalitarian something like what it meant in an older, more innocent Melanesianist literature—a situation in which there is a strong emphasis on some kind of symmetry in exchange, and in which leadership is achieved, fluid and competitive. Liep does not deny that there is a “norm” of reciprocity and symmetry in this classic sense on Rossel Island, he merely thinks the most important thing about this norm is that it is “frequently evaded” (p. 310). Yet he also provides plenty of evidence that balanced reciprocity is built into the very foundations of Rossel Island social organization in a way that makes it at least as fundamental to social life there as the system of ranked ceremonial exchange. We can see this for example in marriage payments. These begin with unilateral payments of bridewealth, perhaps suggesting that wife-givers rank above wife-takers. But over time mutual support and gifts between affines serve to balance out their exchange relationships and to reduce any sense of difference between the two sides. Reciprocity appears here to triumph over an initial hint of hierarchy. The claim that this triumph may be an important aspect of Rossel social life is further reinforced when we learn that marriage on Rossel is ideally patrilateral, leading ‘sides’ over time to trade-off taking the role of wife- givers and wife-takers and to stress the symmetry that holds between them. A similar kind of equivalent exchange is aimed for in mortuary payments, which also even out over time. And there is a strong tendency to exchange pig feasts, such that over time participants play both of the major roles involved in them and tend to give back roughly what they have

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 77 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND received. Finally, we can add that “reciprocity and generosity” is “not absent in everyday hospitality and exchanges of food and labor” (p. 10). Taking all this evidence together, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the ‘norm’ of reciprocity is part of the DNA of all of the most important institutional complexes that shape Rossel Island life except for that of the shell money system and its practices of ranked exchange.2 Liep presents all of this material and recognizes the kind of reading to which it might give rise, but in response to it he turns back to his historical argument about the ancient though devolving status of hierarchy on Rossel. From this point of view, the evidence of reciprocal, egalitarian values I have been discussing should not be seen as “a survival of an ‘original’ structure of restricted exchange, but [as] the result of how groups and leaders on Rossel have come to terms in a limited internal arena when the plug has been pulled, so to speak, on the prestigious connection with an Austronesian chiefly centre” (pp. 330–331). But the question of where these reciprocal, egalitarian features come from historically is not the only one we can pose to these materials, or even the most interesting. From my point of view, a more productive question would be how Rossel Islanders live with what I take to be quite an intense tension between the hierarchical and egalitarian values that mark their lives. I would also ask why the Rossel Islanders live with this tension, not in the sense of how historically they have come to have these two competing values, but rather in the sense of how their uneasy co-existence allows for possibilities that would not be available were Rossel Islanders to decide to forgo one of these values in favor of what would have to be in some respects a less conflicted existence. I cannot fully answer these questions, and the real point of raising them is simply to suggest the possibility that a fully rounded picture of Rossel life would be one that put the tension between reciprocity or equality and hierarchy at its center, rather than focusing only on one side of the tension, as one perforce must do if one takes the hierarchical view afforded by standing on the side of the shell money system. It is worth noting that there do exist Melanesian ethnographies that dwell on the tension between reciprocity and hierarchy, and that they have been quite successful. From the same Massim area as the Rossel Islan- ders, we have Michael Young’s (1971, 1983) two important studies of the Kalauna of Goodenough Island—I would argue that both put this tension front and center. And from the mainland of Papua New Guinea, we now have the many works that have followed Simon Harrison’s (1985) pioneering account of the way the elaborately hierarchical picture of gender relations presented during the course of men’s initiation rituals among the Avatip co-exists with a robust tradition of “secular equality” in relations between men and women outside of ritual confines. Might there be some profit from considering what the Rossel case might add to this tradition of argument? Let me move in that direction by way of concluding my remarks. One gets a strong sense from Liep’s ethnography that there is something decidedly circular about the power of Rossel Island big men. Big men can make exchanges go the way they want them to go because they are powerful, and we know they are powerful because of the way they are able to manipulate exchange. On my first reading of Liep’s book, I thought the appearance of this circle might represent a flaw in his ethnography. I worried that it might be a flaw in that it must be leaving out an account of some basis for the power of big men that is external to the institution of ranked exchange the big men so fully dominate. Unless this were the case, why would people put up with the big men’s dominance of ceremonial

78 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND exchange in the first place, or even with the ceremonial exchange system as a whole—a system in which they seem to find themselves constantly outwitted and frustrated. Unless the big men have some important power that they generate outside of the game of ceremonial exchange that could allow them to make its perpetual losers continue to play, why would those losers not walk away, leaving the big men with no power at all? There are hints in Liep’s ethnography of other sources of the big men’s power, particularly having to do with their control of sacred and important social historical knowledge. But the hints are mostly impressionistic, and I initially wanted a stronger account of the structural grounding of big men’s power outside of the domain of ceremonial exchange. On second reading, I have changed my mind about the nature of big men’s power in Rossel. I’m now inclined to believe the circle of power that is both generated and demonstrated primarily in ceremonial exchange is a real circle in Rossel life. In effect, Rossel Island big men are promulgating, dare we say it, an enormous shell game—one in which there is little real power hidden underneath the shells except that which big men can derive by virtue of the fact that others are willing to play, and mostly to lose. The analogy with Harrison’s argument about ritual hierarchy and secular equality in the Sepik thus becomes even stronger, for we now have a hierarchical institution—ceremonial exchange— that is certainly central to some men’s model of social life, but that is in most respects cut off from the way life unfolds beyond its confines. In Rossel, ceremonial exchange touches marriages, mortuary payments, pig feasts, etc., but in the end all of those institutions cut themselves loose from it by going on to realize values of reciprocity and symmetry that are its antithesis, just as people in Avatip do not credit male hierarchical claims with much force when they are made outside the ritual domain. In a classic piece, Pierre Clastres (1987) once made the argument that Amazonian Indian societies posited chiefs only to systematically exclude them from social life by forcing them to stand outside all of the important circuits of exchange of words, goods and people that constituted it: chiefs talked but no one listened or responded; they gave goods but got few back; and they took wives but did not reciprocate. Like Liep, Clastres made his argument in part to do away with common sense evolutionist arguments. For Liep, the evolutionist assumption that most rankles is that equality and reciprocity come first, and are social primitives, rather than following on the devolution of a hierarchical system. For Clastres, the questionable evolutionary claim is that egalitarian systems are destined to develop, if they develop at all, into hierarchical ones. For the Amazonians he studies, Clastres claims, this does not hold. These societies posit chiefs only to force them outside of society precisely in order to forestall the development of hierarchy—they allow for rank and power and then contain them in a bubble in which they can do little to shape social life. These societies are, as Clastres famously put it, societies against the state. One wonders if a similar argument might be viable in the Rossel case. There, people have allowed big men to sink enormous amounts of time and energy into a ceremonial exchange system that lets them live out in very vivid terms their fantasies of standing at the apex of an elaborately hierarchical social system. Meanwhile, while the big men are otherwise engaged, people are able to get on with living the rest of their lives in something like the largely reciprocal, egalitarian kinds of ways so many other Melanesians do. My concluding argument is no doubt exaggerated, but I offer it by way of pushing the pendulum from Liep’s hierarchical position over to the reciprocal side of the reciprocity/

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 79 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND hierarchy divide. I do so in the hopes that in the end it may settle somewhere back in the middle. Like all really important ethnographies—the ones that last—Liep has given us more than just what we need to follow his own very ingenious and important argument. He has given us enough material to explore the roads through Rossel social life he did not choose to take. By my lights, the highest compliment one can pay a really important, original and challenging ethnography like this is to revel in its surplus and try to read it in fresh ways. It is that kind of compliment I have tried to pay A Papuan Plutocracy here.

NOTES ...... 1 All page number references that do not supply a date are to Liep 2009. 2 It is worth noting that Liep (1989) has told part of this egalitarian, reciprocal story himself, in an essay written, in the language I have adopted here, from the point of view of the system of mortuary exchange. It must also be noted, however, that even in this essay he does not see the egalitarian tendencies of mortuary exchange as undermining an account of Rossel Island life focused on big men’s emphasis on achieving inequalities through other kinds of exchange, so this essay in no way contradicts the main argument of his book. I am grateful to Liep for directing me to this article.

REFERENCES ...... Clastres, Pierre 1987. Society Against the State. New York: Zone Books. Harrison, Simon J. 1985. Ritual Hierarchy and Secular Equality in a Sepik River Village. American Ethnologist 12 (3): 413–426. Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Liep, John 1989. The Day of Reckoning on Rossel Island. In F. H. Damon and R. Wagner (eds), Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Liep, John 2009. A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Robbins, Joel 1994. Equality as a Value: Ideology in Dumont, Melanesia, and the West. Social Analysis 36: 21–70. Weiner, Annette B. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Young, Michael W. 1971. Fighting With Food: Leadership, Values and Social Control in a Masim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Michael W. 1983. Magicians of Manumanua: Living Myth in Kalauna. Berkeley: University of California Press.

JOEL ROBBINS, Ph.D. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO [email protected]

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ON THE RANKING OF SHELLS AND PEOPLE COMMENTS ON A PAPUAN PLUTOCRACY: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND

· CHRIS GREGORY ·

Introduction

This is a magnificent piece of scholarship. It has been a lifetime in the making and it shows on every page, in every paragraph and every sentence of this meticulously argued and beautifully produced ethnography. If the ethnographic studies of the Massim can be likened to ndap shells of different rank, then this book will find its way into the very high division where it will circulate alongside the classics such as Malinowksi’s Argonauts and Young’s Fighting with Food. Liep not so much resolves the theoretical controversies about exchange theory that Armstrong’s 1922 book on Rossel Island shell money generated, but dissolves them and raises a whole new set of more interesting questions. Rossel Island has been defined as exceptional in Melanesian studies because of its extraordinarily complicated shell-money system and its exceptionally difficult language that bears no family resemblances with the Austronesian languages found on the neighbouring islands. Insofar as the exchange-system is concerned, Liep convincingly demonstrates that it is a variation on a familiar Oceanic theme. He does this by presenting original data on the rules and practice of Rossel shell- exchange and situating it expertly in a broader comparative perspective. What makes this book especially valuable is that Liep is well aware of its limitations and makes no attempt to hide this. Of course, every ethnographic report is limited to some extent but what sets Liep’s book apart is that he does his best to define precisely the boundaries of his knowledge and understanding. He is careful to distinguish what he knows well from what he is unsure about and what he does not know. What he gives us then are, respectively, persuasive arguments about which there can be little debate, speculative propositions about which reasonable people may disagree, and questions that require more research. I am primarily concerned with the latter two issues here.

Liep’s central argument

His book has two parts: the first provides the setting, the second his discussion of ranked exchange. Liep is not content to present mere background data in Part One; he is concerned to develop an argument. The central issue is the extent to which Rossel is part of the Massim region and apart from it. From a linguistic point of view the place is unambiguously apart, for, as Levinson (2006b: 158) notes, the language on Rossel is an isolate “whose relations to any other languages are completely obscure”. From a sociological point of view, however, it is a different story, and this is the one Liep tries to tell using comparative ethnography, archaeological evidence and colonial history. The data on the territorial limits of the circulation of Rossel Island shell money (kê and ndap), valuables (lime spatulae, stone axes and red shell necklaces) and state currency (cash)

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 81 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND is revealing as Table 1 below illustrates. Cash, stone axes and red shell necklaces are found throughout the Massim; indeed Rossel is the main manufacturing site of the shell necklaces that are used in the kula. Lime spatulae have a more limited circulation within the Louisiades group of which Rossel is part; ndap shells circulate only in Rossel and the neighbouring island of Sudest, whereas kê shells are only found in Rossel. Ndap and kê shells, then, are quite literally the material objects that define Rossel culture.

Region Type of exchange object kê shells ndap shells lime spatulae stone axes cash and red shell necklaces Rossel Is. √√√√√ Sudest Is. √√√√ Louisiades group √√√ Other Massim √√ regions

Table 1. Type of exchange object by region of use (Source: Liep 2009: 201)

Another telling fact is the pattern of use of these objects in the different types of exchange that occur in Rossel as Table 2, constructed from material supplied by Liep, reveals. The ndap shells are used for all the major exchanges: bridewealth, death, pig feasts, houses and canoes; kê shells for everything except death, whilst money has only permeated pig feasts and houses and canoe exchanges. In other words, bridewealth and death exchange are cash-free zones within Rossel with bridewealth exchanges the only ones where ndap and kê circulate. It is obvious, then, that the sphere of Rossel kinship is the key to understanding the circulation of these shells and Liep rightly identifies the “cycle of social reproduction”, as he calls it, as the sphere requiring special analytical attention. This notion is particularly apt because it draws attention to the diachronic dimension: exchange practices on Rossel set up debts and obligation that last generations.

Exchange Type of exchange activity objects death rituals brideweath pig feasts houses, canoes ndap √√√√ kê √√√ valuables √√√ cash √√

Table 2. Type of exchange object by type of exchange activity (Source: Liep 2009: 209)

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Liep also notes other cultural similarities across the Massim—the ‘megalithic complex’, transvestite dance, linked totems, sago puddings prepared by men—as well as differences. Mortuary rituals are relatively truncated compared to other areas in the Massim, sagali food distributions are absent, and there are no ‘flying witches’. Levinson’s (2006a: 9) recent work on clans and kinship confirms Liep’s observation that the elaborate totemic system— a clan has a plant, a bird and a fish—is shared by Austronesian neighbours. This is significant for Liep’s argument because it suggests that the similarities permeate deep into the social structure of Rossel life. Melanesia is famous for its ceremonial pig exchanges but the Rossel case is, it seems, an intriguing variation on this general theme in interesting ways. In the highlands of PNG hundreds of pigs are exchanged in elaborate ceremonials. In the famous moka exchanges these pigs are led onto ceremonial grounds and given away. In other areas they are butchered, the carved meat displayed and then given away as pork. In Rossel, by contrast, only one pig is killed, cooked, and then distributed along with shell money. Furthermore, a distinction is made between bush pigs and village-fattened pigs of European origin. It is the latter that are the subject of highly structured ceremonial distribution, a tradition that goes back to the time of Armstrong and beyond. The other peculiarity of the Rossel exchange economy is the elaborate ranking of the ndap and kê shell money. A possible first ranking is based on gender. The ndap and kê were special words for penis and vagina (n. 24, p. 200). The kê, Liep (pp. 200–201) argues, may have been a form of women’s wealth. Women de-string them, and they are given to a girl’s closest female relative at marriage. This hypothesis of Liep’s is a plausible one because divisions of traditional wealth items based on gender are found elsewhere in the Pacific. The general idea of ranked valuables, too, is widespread; but what distinguish the Rossel case are the many complicated divisions within each category of shell money. Liep, who is rightly concerned to correct the exceptionalist status of the Rossel exchange system, argues that the variations found in Rossel are part of a general Oceanic theme whose origins are to be found in the deep history of the area. He reviews the archaeological evidence and notes that the Austronesian colonisation which began about 2000BP had a profound influence on the area. With them came the hierarchical chiefly societies, the legacies of which are still with us today. The Trobriand Islands provide the outstanding example of this because a chiefly system—albeit with an unstable hierarchy—can still be found there today. Other societies, of which Rossel is an example, do not have chiefs but, argues Liep, we find other traces of the pre-colonial cultural integration of these societies into the hierarchical Austronesian world. In the particular case of Rossel the outstanding legacy is the system of ranked valuables. “I believe,” argues Liep (p. 328), “that the notion of ranking was introduced into Rossel as part of an articulation with a wider, hierarchical Austronesian areal system.” The argument, Liep concedes, is speculative but advances in Oceanic archaeology in recent years require that the anthropological implications of recent findings must be confronted. We should see this thesis not so much as the rehabilitation of speculative history but as an hypothesis for serious discussion. A consideration of the deep history of Rossel poses two distinct questions: the origins of their language and the origins of ranked exchange. These are separate questions, I would argue, because the latter raises the question of value which is a transhistorical problem. Thus the deep history of language must account

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 83 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND for the uniqueness of the Rossel language while the deep history of value must account for the fact that Rossel is a recognizable variation on a general theme. That said, the specific thesis Liep wants to develop about the historical relationship between ranked societies and ranked exchange must be questioned because a ranked exchange system does not necessary need a ranked society as its condition of existence, a point I will return to below. Liep has used the concrete case-study method in order to comprehend the bewildering complexity of the shell-money exchanges that surround the main exchanges at marriage, death and pig feasts. The task of truly understanding the complexity, it must be said, is impossible. One would need a team of ‘ethno-accountants’—one for each big man—working 24/7 over many generations to record all the transactions. Even if one could collect all this data, one would still have the problem of uncovering the rules from the strategies. The problem Liep was confronted with, then, was the classic one of trying to see the wood for the trees. He has managed to do this by dogged persistence over a long period of time. His great ethnographic achievement has been to uncover the simple complexity of the situation by showing that the financial procedures are governed by six basic principles (see ch. 10). The six principles do not admit of a simple summary though it suffices to say that “deception and default is an essential element of the game” (p. 318). Liep is right to stress the generality of this essential element. Indeed, deception is probably one of the defining characteristics of homo sapiens (Leslie 1987). Another important ethnographic achievement is to show how all this complexity derives from the ‘cycle of social reproduction’, by which he means the synchronic and diachronic relations of kinship and marriage. He stresses the need to distinguish ‘clans’ from ‘sides’. The former are the familiar exogamous descent groups that lie at the heart of much theorising about kinship and exchange. These are usually seen as the corporate land owning groups that exchange women. In Rossel the clans are matrilineal but these are dispersed and do not function as organised groups. There is also a very strong patrilineal ideology on Rossel which is important for the transmission of names and shell money, among other things. However, it is the ‘sides’ which he says are the key to understanding the strategies of everyday practice concerning exchanges of shells in the key spheres of marriage, death, pig feasts, etc. But what is a ‘side’ (yoo)? How widespread is this phenomenon? As I understand Liep, this notion is an ego-centric type kindred grouping that stands opposed to the socio-centric clans. In other words, clan is an ‘absolute’ category whereas sides are relative conceptions. Thus there are always two sides, the giver and the receiver, and the parents of the bride and groom become focal points for the fanning out of sides. He notes that the notion is a widespread throughout the Pacific and provides evidence and argues that “the organisation of kinship exchanges is much more complex than the simple model of an exchange between two groups establishing an alliance” (p. 218). This simple model is, he argues, highly misleading for the Rossel case. I confess that I am particularly receptive to this idea because I have found that the notion of ‘side’ is extremely important for understanding kinship in middle India. Like Rossel the Halbi speakers of India have exogamous clans but the pragmatics of everyday life hinges around indigenous notions of ‘brotherhood’ and ‘otherhood’. This is a relative grouping of an us/them kind. Of course, the constitution of the ‘us’ group and the ‘them’ group is different from the Rossel case but is, as I will suggest below, crucial for understanding indigenous notions of equality and rank.

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Liep’s central argument, then, raises the general question of the relationship between history (deep and shallow), kinship and exchange. The rich ethnography he presents has clarified some old questions and raised new ones. However, given the importance of kinship for his thesis, a curious absence from his book is a discussion of Rossel kinship terminology, something he obviously has lots of data on, and views about, that differ in some respects from the account given by Levinson (2006a).

Towards a critique:

The forgoing has tried to convey something of the richness of Liep’s ethnography and the argument that sustains it. There can be no question that he has moved the debate well beyond that started by Armstrong’s ethnography by providing us with new ethnographic insights into Rossel Island shell money and the values that inform its use. The great merit of the book, I repeat, is that Liep defines the limits of his argument very precisely. I come now to a consideration of these limits and of the new directions his work opens up.

Alienability and inalienability

If Liep makes a mistake defining the limits of his book then it is on the side of modesty. He stresses that his inability to learn the language severely limited his ability to understand the culture. This is certainly true but very few anthropologists have succeeded in mastering a Papuan language and even fewer admit it. Nevertheless his use of the case study method has supplied him with a rich haul of ‘objective’ data. While he has not always been able to provide an indigenous exegesis of this material, his use of the comparative method and deep history has enabled him to provide an interpretation of the data that locates the specificities of the Rossel case within a general theoretical framework. Most importantly, though, his work poses new questions for future research. Just as he has done to Arm- strong, so will future ethnographers do unto him. In the spirit of constructive critique, I would like to ruminate on some of his theoretical interpretations and on the directions his research may take us. Critiques often tell us more about the critics than the work under consideration. This is because the thoughts of critics are determined by their own fieldwork experience and the theoretical position they hold. In order that the reader may judge the fairness of my comments I should state that I am the author of a book on colonial PNG called Gifts and Commodities (1982) whose central argument Liep finds “dogmatic” and “absurd” (p. 9). These are harsh words and I am unable to let them pass unchallenged. Any author welcomes critical engagement with their work, but it is something else to be the target of barbs like ‘dogmatic’ and ‘absurd’ especially when they are based on unsubstantiated assertions that are the polar opposite of the truth. Contrary to what Liep claims, I have never claimed that gifts are ‘ontologically inalienable’. The historical dialectic between alienability and inalienability has always been my central concern as a quick glance at the table of contents of my book reveals (see also 1982: preface, 115–116). Furthermore, the idea that my historically-informed method has anything in common with the ahistorical “controlled fictions” of Marilyn Strathern (1988: 6) is simply false as Strathern, who has

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 85 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND fully understood my basic argument, acknowledges (1988: 18). Fortunately polemics of this kind, and lapses in attention to scholarly detail, are rare in Liep’s book. The fact is that I am broadly sympathetic to the theoretical and methodological position Liep adopts. Like him I believe that it is important to stand firm on the scientific status of anthropology and that progress can be achieved with better data and persuasive argument. Like him, I also believe that it is necessary to analyse the dialectical relationship between alienability and inalienability in a historical context. Generalising synthetic accounts like mine, based as they are on secondary data, demand to be critiqued in the light of new ethnographic data of the kind Liep has provided. In this respect Liep’s ethnography provides new historical information on inalienability absolutely essential for understanding the shell money transactions on Rossel today. He tells of how a fire destroyed many high-ranking shells leading to a reform of the system such that many high-ranking ndap became inalienable. He notes that this event, along with other events that occurred in the early colonial period, required the islanders to make considerable adjustments (pp. 189–191). In his attempt to make sense of this historical and other ethnographic evidence he collected, Liep finds the theoretical answer to his problems in Annette Weiner’s (1992) theory of inalienable possessions. I find this a curious choice because her work is ahistorical and her so-called paradox of ‘keeping while giving’ strikes me as contradictory rather than paradoxical. Kula valuables, for example, are not kept and given; they are unambiguously given not kept (albeit reluctantly upon occasion). As for high-ranking ndap shells, they are not kept and given; they are unambiguously kept and loaned out for short periods of time. In any case, Weiner’s ahistorical theory cannot explain the circulation of low ranking shells which “approach cash and are used interchangeably with coins at pig feasts” (p. 182). This is the familiar case of things being now gifts, now commodities, now something else, depending on the social context. Liep’s work helps us understand the specific ethnographic context on Rossel. He reminds us that there is no ‘watertight boundary’ between the high and low division, but rather a ‘sliding transition’ between the categories. As such, the playing card analogy that many people have used, myself included, needs to be rethought. The internal ranks do not form a fixed, well-ordered sequence such as 2, 3, 4 … 10, J, Q, K, Ace of hearts. The ranking, Liep (p. 183) tells us, is not based on a fixed standard at all but, rather, is one that must be continually re-negotiated. Thus “the performances of exchanges becomes much more of an art that requires specialist knowledge, as well as, sometimes, persuasive skill”. In other words, values have valuers. Our eye must not be seduced by the glitter and beauty and apparently fixed rank order of the material objects; we must shift our glance, as Liep does, to the valuers: to the big men and other people who control them and give them their values.

Exchanges and life-cycle rituals

I turn now to the questions of where Liep’s work might lead us by locating his study in a broader comparative context. Liep’s findings concerning marriage exchange and death rituals illustrate yet again a very familiar theme that is found in the Pacific generally. People in this part of the world invest an extraordinary amount of time, energy and money in gift exchanges

86 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND centred on marriages and deaths. These exchanges seem to be never-ending and ever subject to inflationary pressures over time. If agricultural involution characterises the production systems of rice farmers in Indonesia then cultural involution is the name of the game in the exchange systems of the people of the Pacific. Liep’s description of the marriage and death rituals on Rossel fit into this general pattern. He notes (p. 232), for example, that bridewealth payments have become greatly inflated throughout the twentieth century: the amount of ndap in bridewealth has doubled while the quantity of ndap has risen by up to 800 percent. Marriage sets up a cycle of exchanges that lasts for decades. The eventual death of the married couple is but a moment in this cycle that continues until the death of the children of a marriage; but this cycle is in turn part of another that begins with the marriage of the children, and so on. His ethnography is rightly concerned only with local historical explanations for local problems. For example, he argues that bridewealth inflation must be seen in relation to the intensified social intercourse in Rossel Island brought about by colonisation. “Exchange,” he argues, “has been democratized in the sense that more people are now involved and wider relationships activated in exchange events” (p. 232). The merits of this argument aside, data like this, seen in its broader context, poses the general question of why all this cultural elaboration? Liep places his book in the broader context of the Pacific. However, my experience of working in India and the Pacific suggests that an even broader frame of references is needed, one that covers Asia and the Pacific as a whole. This was the frame of reference for Lévi- Strauss’ (1969 [1949]) classic work on kinship and it may be time to rehabilitate comparative thinking on this scale, modified of course to take account of present historical circumstances and questions. Insofar as marriage and marriage payments go, two obvious facts stand out for me. The first is that cultural involution in India centres on the once-off wedding ritual rather than ongoing marriage exchanges. In both places there is hyper-inflation in the amount of time, energy and money devoted to staging the rituals and the exchanges associated with them, but in India all this is focussed on the once-off ritual that celebrates the beginning of the union. This concern with the precise point in time becomes almost an obsession in the case of wealthier families who employ astrologers to fix the precise wedding time to the second to ensure an auspicious future for the newlyweds. In Fiji, where around 40 percent of the population are of Indian descent, this contrast between the Asian wedding ritual and the ongoing Pacific marriage and death exchanges defines an aspect of the multicultural life that is contemporary Fiji. Christianity has introduced the wedding into Fijian culture but as something in addition to, rather than as a replacement for, the traditional death and marriage ritual exchanges. The second fact is that matrilateral cross-cousin (MZD) marriage is found in the elite extremes of this Asia to Polynesia region with patrilateral cross-cousin (FZD) marriage occurring mainly in Melanesia. Rossel Island fits this general model because here a father’s sister daughter (FZD) is a preferred marriage partner (pp. 253–257). Among the Tongan elite (Campbell 2001: 42), a preference for marriage with MBD can be found, a similar situation to that found among some Tamil Brahmins (Gough 1956). But we must not be too hasty to reach conclusions about the apparent similarities of the Tonga and Tamil Brahman case even though both are hierarchical societies because Tonga is like Rossel in

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 87 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND that marriage and death exchanges are culturally elaborated whereas among the Tamil Brahmans it is the wedding ritual. Why is it that marriages in the Pacific are culturally elaborated and weddings in India? Part of the reason for this is that women are radically severed from their father’s kindred and lineage in India whereas they are not in the Pacific. This has far-reaching social and cultural implications which cannot be gone into here save to say that indigenous notions of rank and hierarchy are but one of them. But just what do these words ‘rank’ and ‘hierarchy’ mean?

The rank order of people

Liep uses the terms ‘rank’ and ‘hierarchy’ interchangeably as in: “The most elaborate hierarchy in the region was that found in the Trobriands where there was a division of rank between noble matrilineages (guyau) and commoners (tokay)” (p. 38, emphasis added). He also tends to speak of ‘inequality’ and ‘stratification’ in the one breath (p. 331). He opposes ‘equality’ to ‘inequality’ and speaks of Melanesian inequalities versus Micronesian hierarchies (pp. 20–21). Liep does not spell out clearly what distinguishes inequality from hierarchy but, as I understand him, it seems to be the number of axes on the power relations found in different areas. In Rossel there are two—age and gender—but these, he stresses, are not reducible to single determinative set of factors. Male dominance, he argues, “is embedded in an ideological realm of reproductive taboos” (p. 126). Age divides males into juniors and seniors; it also sub-divides the latter into big men and rubbish men. Melanesian equality, too, has its dimensions but for Liep this is an ‘overgrowth’ in the Massim, not something that has deep roots.

Overall, we find in the Massim traces of asymmetric affinal relations that indicate that there is a hierarchical aspect to marriage alliance, but apart from the Trobriands they are overgrown with institutions and practices that tend to produce symmetry in either the short or long term. (p. 49)

In other words, Melanesian equality is found in the symmetry that marriage alliances produce over time. Patrilateral cross-cousin is one classic way of bringing this about. In the language of ‘sides’, wife-givers and wife-receivers achieve a short or long-term equality in status. As Liep notes: “In contemporary practice the affinal relationship is reciprocal” (p. 235). This fact, he says, is reflected in the affinal terminology. He finds some evidence of the superiority of wife-takers but asserts that this is a “relic of former times” (p. 235). Insofar as marriage is concerned, then, ranked exchange in Rossel brings about an equality in the rank of the wife-giving and wife-receiving sides. This is the underlying paradox of Liep’s book: ranked exchange, equality of sides. This raises the question of the dimension of inequality that characterises Polynesian societies such as Tonga. Liep’s discussion of ‘hierarchy’ in the Trobriands suggests that the answer is to be found in the distinction between nobles and commoners. This indeed is a defining characteristic of the Island Kingdom of Tonga. However, while ‘stratification’, ‘hierarchy’ and ‘rank’ are concepts that belong to the same semantic fields it is important to distinguish them if we are to have any hope of making progress in understanding ranked exchange in these different regions.

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Stratification has its basis in economics and property. In an agrarian economy, for example, one is either landed or landless; those with land have either more of it or less. Hierarchy, Dumont (1980: 36–38) reminds us, is an ordering of people based on religious values not economic ones. For him the key religious value of Indian hierarchy was purity and pollution: Brahmans are pure, sweepers impure, with endless intermediate classes in between. Hierarchy in the Pacific, he noted (1980: 139–140), was based on different religious values but the details can be passed over because it is ‘rank’ that is in question here. Rank, for its part, is an ordering based on respect: people of equal rank show each other mutual respect; those of lower rank show superiors respect. This varies from culture to culture but bodily behaviour is one obvious way it is expressed among others: one does not stand above a chief; one touches the feet of one’s father, etc. Rank, hierarchy and stratification are cross-cutting orderings of people found in all societies. They are closely related concepts but not identical. Just how is beyond the scope of this note but it is useful to pursue the difference between rank and stratification a little further. It is clear that a society such as the Trobriands is based on rank just like Tonga, but that stratification in the latter is much more pronounced in the sense that the royal family owns all land. But the key to understanding rank in the Pacific is not just the respect commoners have for nobles but the respect that cross-siblings have for each other. Here is a third important contrast with India: generally speaking, mutual respect characterises the relationship between cross siblings in the Pacific; in India, by contrast, it is mutual familiarity (Wadley 1976). The mutual respect that cross-siblings have for each other in the Pacific varies but the general theme of avoidance is a widespread one that has received much scholarly attention (Marshall 1983). One sign of this contrast are differences in modes of greeting. In Fiji, for example, indigenous Fijians greet each other with a hug and a cheek- to-cheek kiss but cross-siblings do not touch. Indo-Fijians have adopted this mode of greeting as their own and cross-siblings greet each other this way too. Indo-Fijians, too, have relatives they avoid but cross-siblings are not in this category. While an avoidance relationship generally characterises the relationship between brothers and sisters in the Pacific, the precise nature of the avoidance varies greatly. Of particular interest is the variation to be found in Tonga. Here cross-sibling respect is asymmetrical rather than mutual: the brother must show respect for his sister even if she is younger. The force of this value varies from family to family but, as a value, it is a crucial one for understanding the specificities of rank in Tonga and, by inference, the form rank takes in Rossel. This is because it brings us back to the question of sides. If patrilateral cross cousin marriage is the preferred form in Rossel then it is the matrilateral form that is preferred in Tonga. As such, valuables go from ego to the father’s side whilst demands to give can be made from relatives on the mother’s side. As Morton (1996: 122) notes, “One of the earliest lessons children learn is to kole, make requests, particularly of their matrilateral relatives.” The idea of the gift as a demand or a request is an important theme in the Pacific, and possibly elsewhere, that has not been given due emphasis in the literature. This is because the obligation to give has been framed in terms of the idea of generosity and subordinated to the obligation to repay with increment. Liep is right to critique the idea of generosity. The idea of request is a key theme of his book (e.g. pp. 18, 93, 196) and is an issue that calls out for further investigation and development in a comparative context. In Fiji, for

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 89 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND example, requests to give are called kerekere. One of the best ethnographic descriptions of this notion can be found in Sahlins’ ethnography of the Fiji island of Moala (Sahlins 1962: 203ff.). However, it is something of an irony that the theoretical significance of this material remains undeveloped in his classic treatment of the theory of exchange (Sahlins 1972). The comparative question that arises concerns the question of from whom one can request. This evidence would suggest that the answer to this question is tied up with the values of respect and the rank-order of sides. The obligation to give in response to a request is different from the obligation to repay a rival in an agonistic bout of competitive giving, but clearly both obligations are present in the classic Highlands PNG systems of exchange. The would-be big man makes requests of his kin as he assembles his big moka to give to his opponent. In the ranked societies of Polynesia the emphasis is on affirming the chiefly status quo rather than trying to resolve the unstable ‘alternating disequilibrium’ of big men. The context of the request is, therefore, very different. The nature of the big-man system on Rossel, Liep argues, is a plutocracy. Just what this involves it not fully developed in Liep’s book. His main contribution is to present an ethnography of ranked exchange, not one of a ranked and stratified society. In this respect his main title is something of a misnomer. Plutocracy, as he defines it, is an apt description of a class society of the Tonga-type but not of Rossel. He provides some anecdotal evidence of stratification—noting the better houses the big men live in for example—but the data is unconvincing. In any case, Tonga is both stratified in class terms and ranked in terms of sides, the basis of the latter being the asymmetry of cross-siblings (younger sisters > brothers; wife receivers > wife givers). It may have been that the ancient Tongans planted the seeds of a rank society as they passed through the Massim all those centuries ago and that the symmetry we find now between the sides is a relatively recent ‘overgrowth’ but the data presented here is unpersuasive as it stands. We need more data on sibling rank and kinship relations generally; we also need more data on the inheritance and the strategies of the plutocrats to control wealth. But that would be another book. This book needs to be appreciated for what it is: a detailed ethnographic investigation of ranked exchange in one of the most complicated systems of shell money on ethnographic record. A better title would have been Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island: A Papuan Plutocracy? for such a title would have captured what the book has achieved and a question it poses.

REFERENCES ...... Campbell, Ian 2001. Island Kingdom: Tonga Ancient and Modern. Christchurch: University of Canterbury. Dumont, Louis 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gough, E. Kathleen 1956. Brahman Kinship in a Tamil Village. American Anthropologist 58 (5), 826–853. Leslie, Alan M. 1987. Pretense and Representation: The Origins of “Theory of Mind”. Psychological Review 94 (4): 412–426. Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1969 [1949]. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Levinson, Stephen C. 2006a. Matrilineal Clans and Kin Terms on Rossel Island. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 48 (1): 1–43. Levinson, Stephen C. 2006b. The Language of Space in Yeli Dnye. In S. Levinson and D. Wilkins (eds),

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Grammars of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, Mac (ed.) 1983. Siblingship in Oceania: Studies in the Meaning of Kin Relations. New York: University Press of America, ASAO Monographs No 8. Morton, Helen 1996. Becoming Tongan: An Ethnography of Childhood. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Sahlins, Marshall 1962. Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Sahlins, Marshall 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine. Strathern, Marilyn 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiner, Annette B. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wadley, Susan S. 1976. Brothers, Husband, and Sometimes Sons: Kinsmen in North India Ritual. The Eastern Anthropologist 29 (2), 149–167.

CHRIS GREGORY, Ph. D. READER IN ANTHROPOLOGY, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER [email protected]

EXCHANGE AND INEQUALITY, TIME AND PERSONHOOD COMMENTS ON A PAPUAN PLUTOCRACY: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND

· TON OTTO ·

This is a book that captures the reader’s attention from the start, not only because of its beautiful lay-out and illustrations and the exotic phenomena that it describes, but also thanks to the author’s academic assiduousness that transpires through its pages. It is the culmination of more than 35 years of dedicated study of a curious and complex system of monetary exchange that exists on Rossel Island, an eastern outlier of the Louisiade Archipelago, far to the east of the mainland of Papua New Guinea. In Part I ‘The Setting’, the book provides an overall ethnography of the Island, which forms the background for its focus on ranked exchange in Part II. Rossel Islanders have developed a system of monetary exchange which is unique in the world because of its complexity. Two distinct shell currencies (ndap and kê) each comprise as many as twenty ranked categories of shells that play different roles in various exchange practices. It is a prime achievement of this book to describe these practices in detail and to develop an original set of theoretical concepts to be able to do this. Thus the shells can variously be used to make a deposit, provide a security, constitute a replacement, solicit a gift, offer a pledge, or return a (reduced) substitution (see p. 298 ff.). Ranked exchange is of course not limited to Rossel Island, but the unique complexity of the Rossel system derives from the combination of three features: the extraordinary number of categories in the rank order; the feature of ‘licensing’, which involves the use of inalienable shells in initiating exchanges (making a deposit that is later returned); and the

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 91 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND mobilisation of high-ranking shells as pledges along a chain of serial incremental transfers. I find John Liep’s description of ranked exchange on Rossel an impressive ethnographic and analytic achievement and believe that it will be a touchstone for future work on monetary exchange. In the following I will suggest some limitations in Liep’s theoretical rendering of his ethnography, which have to do with his overall theoretical position, a relative neglect of the time dimension in exchange, and a lack of interest in the possibilities of newer theory on Melanesian exchange and personhood. I describe these limitations not to diminish the outstanding importance of this book, but to highlight the areas where in my view further theoretical and analytical work could be beneficial and could cast new light on the phenomena described. I give my views with due respect for Liep’s inspiring and imposing accomplishments, well knowing that it is always easier to find areas that are underdeveloped in a book than to prove an author wrong on the arguments and analyses he has chosen to pursue.

A middle range practice theory and social inequality

Liep’s theoretical ambition and achievement does not stop with his new classification of ranked monetary exchange on Rossel Island. He wishes to understand this complex system in its wider social, political, cultural as well as historical context. He chooses to view exchange as a processual field of practices, executed by agents who do not rigidly observe fixed rules but who act with regard to conventional guidelines that allow for ad hoc improvisation. The actors make their choices on the basis of cultural values and in the context of power relations, which give some agents greater scope for making decisions than others. In contrast to structuralist approaches, Liep does not want to understand the exchange system as a holistic model of society seen as a singular unit, but rather as a decentralised field of local exchange events and practices, changing over time. He calls his approach ‘a kind of middle range practice theory’, which leaves room both for individual action and for structural constraints of power and culture. In line with this Liep also develops a cultural-historical hypothesis about the origin of the system which comprises both the introduction of Austronesian matrilineal organisation and ranking, and the local elaboration of internal exchange through a combination of invention and island integration. In the more recent history since pacification he discerns a process of pecuniary schismogenesis. This involves two opposing tendencies: a trend to commoditize indigenous forms of wealth and social reproduction and a trend to protect these indigenous forms by erecting or strengthening boundaries against the encroachment of commoditization (following Appadurai 1986, Liep calls this process ‘enclaving’). These two tendencies are the result of political negotiations and conflicts between local agents, in which Rossel ‘big men’ have been able to keep Western money away from those exchanges that are most closely concerned with the control of people and the reproduction of their relationships. In these fields traditional shell money still rules supreme and provides the basis of the power of a group of older men. This explains Liep’s choice of the title of the book: A Papuan Plutocracy. I have a lot of sympathy for Liep’s theoretical contextualisation of the Rossel Island exchange system and its historical origin and find his hypotheses very plausible. In particular

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I applaud the way in which he depicts shell money as “more than a means of payment and medium of prestige; it is an instrument of dominance” (p. 343). I also like his analysis of the historical processes of ‘interference’ and how this has resulted in the ‘enclaving’ of key exchanges of shell money. He sketches a history which is more than the reproduction and transformation of impersonal systems, since he gives place to the actions of human actors who are guided by their interests and constrained by their positions in systems of power relations. The following comments therefore in no way aim to criticize this theoretical positioning in a radical way, but have to be understood as suggestions that may or may not complement it. In the first place Liep criticises an implicit assumption that is deeply rooted in the traditional anthropological understanding of reciprocity, as this is developed by Malinowski, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Sahlins and Gregory. This implicit assumption is that the actors involved in reciprocal exchange are equal and start from symmetrical positions. Liep joins those critics who see this underlying assumption as a reflection of Western economic ideology and who state that reciprocal exchange relations more often than not start from unequal positions (Dumont 1977, 1986; Weiner 1992). Liep’s ethnography of Rossel shows convincingly that, just as in the West, people do not have equal starting positions. Some have inherited important shells, or have been able to get crucial knowledge about genealogies and family histories, or knowledge about magical spells and sacred places (p. 129 ff.). In addition, there are the key differentiating dimensions of gender and age. Liep argues that senior men as a group are most influential but also that there are differences among these older men which give some a more leading position than others. We have already mentioned the possession of shells and knowledge, but in addition there are also personal characteristics such as the capacity to maintain a high level of activity and initiative and also, more negatively, the capacity to be cunning and use tricks (pp. 310, 318). I agree with all this, but my impression is that Liep emphasises inequality as a starting position, and thus de- emphasises inequality as a result of exchanges. In my own ethnographic study of another society in Papua New Guinea, I have come across cases of little men who became big men, perhaps against all odds, because they were motivated to maintain a high level of activity and initiative and because they were able to acquire the necessary knowledge and cunning through a process of trial and error. Thus if the picture of exchange sketched by Liep needs some adjustment, it is to highlight that exchange, true enough, always happens in a field of power relations, but that it also can effect these power relations. This is so because reciprocal exchange is an open system that not only reproduces inequality but also can generate new inequalities. My second comment is perhaps more fundamental, as it concerns the premises of Liep’s theoretical position. With Weiner (1992) he criticises classical exchange theory for having assimilated implicit notions about exchange derived from Western market ideology. As already mentioned, this concerned primarily the premise that exchange partners enter transactions from symmetrical positions as equal individuals. In reaction Liep has emphasised the inequality that characterises real world exchange transactions. Even though this is an appropriate critique of Western economic ideology and its implicit individualism, Liep’s position can nevertheless still be criticised for remaining within this larger Western tradition. His choice of practice theory is a case in point, because this theoretical perspective has unmistakable roots in Marxism and Western economic thinking (Jenkins 1992). Other

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 93 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND indications are his focus on shell exchanges as “financial procedures” (see below), his reference to a Rossel “labour theory of value” (p. 231), and his use of related theoretical concepts such as “class” (p. 343). My critique is not that these concepts are inadequate because they derive from a Western context, but rather that they perhaps do not provide a full picture of these non-Western phenomena. Whereas Liep gives a quite persuasive depiction of how wealthy old men as a group have been able to maintain a dominant position through their control of shell exchange ‘as an instrument of dominance’, I still feel that too much weight is given to the actions of individuals consciously pursuing their own interest. Even though these interests have been present and may have been consciously pursued, such a historical- middle-range-practice theory cannot explain how these plutocrats succeeded in persuading the rest of society to accept the hierarchical values that are at the basis of the ranked exchange system. To sketch a fuller picture we have to know why shells have received so much respect, why they were believed to become empowered by the spirit of cannibal victims (p. 312), what their relation is to social value and personal worth, etc. In short we need a theoretical perspective that places monetary exchange in a wider context of personhood and agency, something that has already been pursued by representatives of what has become known as New Melanesian Ethnography (see below). I completely agree with Liep that “theories are not scripts for reality but instruments with which to explore it” (p. 5). I endorse his theoretical efforts because they undeniably cast light on the complex exchange procedures he describes, including their relation to inequality and their hypothetical origin. What I suggest here is that there may be a complementary way of looking at these phenomena that departs in a more radical way from Western economic premises. Such a radical departure services the aim of anthropology which Liep mentions on the last page of his wonderful book: that anthropology as a social science must be a critical science. Such critical stance may be found in a practice-theoretical perspective—as Liep opts for—but it should, in my view, also include the most radical examination possible of the premises of our theoretical models.

Exchange and time

Liep explains that his interest in the Rossel Island monetary system arose because it was seen as one of the unsolved mysteries of economic anthropology at the time he chose a project for his Ph.D. research. Wallace Edwin Armstrong (1928) was the first to study Rossel Island society in 1921 and had been fascinated by the complexity of its money exchanges, which existed as a number of ranked values that could not be compared according to a common ratio. He tried to make sense of this system by seeing time as the unit that could link the various value categories, if one understood the difference between them as compound interest on loans. Liep (1995) and others (Dalton 1965; Douglas 1967) have amply pointed out that this model of ‘primitive capitalism’, in which all strived to make a profit by lending shell money, could not fit the empirical data, even those collected and described by Armstrong himself. Although I fully agree with this, I find that the rejection of Armstrong’s idea about time (as interest) perhaps has led to a general lack of appreciation of the central role of time in processes of exchange on Rossel.

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Let me unpack the different elements in this argument. First, I would like to focus on time as a central dimension of exchange practices that allows for creating inequality. Pierre Bourdieu’s well-known critique of the structural explanation of reciprocal gift exchange points exactly to the neglect of time and timing (Bourdieu 1977: 4–9, 1990: 98–111, 2000: 206–245). Returning a gift (too) early, or (too) late, or not at all, are possibilities with very different significance and potential outcome, depending on the balance of power between the protagonists. Thus delaying a counter prestation can be a strategic action to confirm or enhance one’s superior status. Liep’s own material confirms that gifts (or ‘loans’) are not automatically and not always returned. This concerns especially shells given as a pledge for another one of higher value. The giver of the higher-valued shell needs to argue that he needs this shell again for another exchange in order to get it back, and he still risks a refusal, even though the norm is that the pledge can be exchanged at will (pp. 306–307). A stronger man can hang on to the higher-valued shell longer and this both confirms his status and gives him more room for manoeuvring in other exchanges. This enhanced capacity to enter exchange is essential and is to a large extent based on the power to delay and thus control other people’s time. A Dobuan big man explained this in no uncertain words to Reo Fortune (1932: 215):

Suppose I, Kisian of Tewara, go [north] to the Trobriands and secure an armshell called Monitor Lizard. Then I go [south] to Sanaroa and in four different places secure four different shell necklaces, promising each man who gives me a shell necklace, Monitor Lizard in return, later. I, Kisian do not have to be very specific in my promise. It will be conveyed by implication and assumption for the most part. Later, when four men appear in my home at Tewara each expecting Monitor Lizard, only one will get it. The other three are not defrauded permanently, however. They are furious, it is true, and their exchange is blocked for a year. Next year. When I, Kisian, go again to the Trobriands I shall represent that I have four necklaces at home waiting for those who will give me four armshells. I obtain more armshells than I did previously, and pay my debts a year late (…) I have become a great man by enlarging my exchanges at the expense of blocking [the exchanges of others] for a year. I cannot afford to block their exchanges for too long, or my exchanges will never be trusted by anyone again. I am honest in the final issue.

The central message of this citation is that Kisian gains status—becomes a ‘great man’—by manipulating the time and thus exchange possibilities of others. Dobu lies in the same region as Rossel, but similar processes of time manipulation have been observed elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, for example by Mervin Meggitt in Enga in the PNG Highlands. Meggitt (1974: 190) mentions that big men retain resources for themselves by delaying compensation to weak members of their group of followers. Thus the delay of return prestations is the very mechanism that creates value for the person who is able to enforce such a delay, as he can use his shells (or other resources) for entering new exchanges and thus for enhancing his position. In this way the value of particular shells or prestations is not completely fixed but depends on the capacities of the exchangers to manipulate time to their advantage. This is, of course, not the same as interest on loan, in the way Arm- strong saw it, but on the other hand it shows a clear connection between delay in return and value creation—which lies at the basis of the concept of interest (in addition to the concept of the risk of no return). The difference with interest is that the one who delays the return is also the one who gains, not the one receiving the return.

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My criticism of Liep is not that he denies the role of time, but that he does not acknowledge its central position in the creation of (unequal) value. It appears that Rossel Islanders do reflect on the relationship between time and value, like the Dobuan big man, for example when they describe the strategy of how to “let the pledge grow itself” by requesting a higher value in return (pp. 308–309). My suggestion is not to alter the very fine and comprehensive classification of ‘financial procedures’ that Liep has produced, but rather to try to extend his characterisation by systematically considering the role of time in the various transactions. As suggested above, an important aspect of the so-called pledges is that they are mechanisms for the extraction of value. Time plays also a clear role in the value of the ndap shells of the very high division which have an individual name and history. The particular history of the exchanges these shells have been part of is the very core of their unique valuation (see Weiner 1992). Again time increases value in this example, not in the form of delayed exchange but in the form of conspicuous appearance at prestigious events. These highly valued shells (of the very high and high divisions) have now become the inalienable property of their owners. Their value is so high that they are not exchanged any more but some (those of the high division) enter exchange arrangements temporarily as ‘deposits’. They open and lend prestige to the exchange transaction through their presence, but they have to be returned to their owner after the original presentation. They are then replaced by a lower-valued substitute, the forthcoming of which is guaranteed by the original high value shell. It appears that we here have another kind of link between value and time than with the delayed return of pledges. These important shells have accumulated their value over a long period of time and this time-based value is now used by their big-man owners to enter exchanges without risking a loss. As the top- shells are necessary for certain types of exchange relations (such as initiating a brideprice payment or a pig feast) they can be seen as means to control the time of others, who depend on their presence. Their time-amassed value can initiate or stop exchanges that are crucial for the reproduction of society and thus constitute an important resource of power for their owners, who form, as Liep writes, “an influential class of wealthy people” (p. 343). By keeping these time honoured shells in their possession, this class of owners manipulate time in such a way as to preserve existing hierarchies. This is in line with Annette Weiner’s (1992) thesis of ‘keeping-while-giving’. The top-shells freeze hierarchical identities at the same time as they facilitate the exchange of other valuables. They are tied to the persons of their owners. This close connection is illustrated by the practice of displaying a big man’s wealth on his body at the time of his death (pp. 323–325).

Exchange and personhood

The last aspect I would like to discuss concerns whether a different theoretical perspective would shed new light on some of the phenomena described by John Liep. In particular I refer to the so-called New Melanesian Ethnography (NME) which is represented by authors like Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner, Mark Mosko, Eric Hirsch and others. I find it surprising that Liep does not explore in some depth the potential of this theoretical perspective, as one of its main achievements is the reanalysis and re-conceptualisation of exchange relations in Melanesia. No doubt unduly simplifying, one could say that Strathern and others,

96 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND building on Gregory’s theoretisation of gifts and commodities, develop the idea that conceptions of personhood in Melanesia are closely linked to exchange practices and cannot be understood without them. This seems quite relevant for the practices described by Liep, as I will show, but he only explains in a footnote (n. 3, p. 8) why he refrains from using Strathern’s influential Gender of the Gift (1988). The reason he provides is that Strathern, like Gregory, assumes that gifts are ontologically inalienable, something Liep thoroughly disagrees with. Leaving aside whether this reading of Strathern (and Gregory) is correct or not, it still surprises me that this reason would be sufficient to discard the whole approach, which could have provided an alternative understanding of a number of the practices described by Liep. Before turning to my major example, the pig feast, I would like to quote a place where Liep actually comes quite close to describing a NME perspective on Rossel. This is where he discusses the reason for paying bridewealth as part of marriage exchanges. Rossel people explain this by referring to the hard work done by the bride’s family to raise and feed her. “There is thus a notion that, by nurturing somebody through providing that person with food, one so to speak ‘gets a share’ in the person, so that this service may constitute a basis for a claim to a girl’s bridewealth” (p. 231). Liep calls this a Rossel version of a ‘labour theory of value’ which, he suggests, may have been influenced by their experience of commodity production and paid labour in recent history! If Liep had taken the NME perspective more to heart, he would not need Western labour theory to explain this local representation of bridewealth payments, which makes a lot of sense if one accepts the premises of NME: persons are built up from the gifts and services provided to them and these elements constitute the relations of which they are part. Severing a girl from her family at marriage thus requires a rearrangement of the elements of her person that constitute her relations to her family, who have to be ‘compensated’ for their loss. Liep chooses to maintain a more narrow monetary perspective on the shell exchanges he studied, based on more traditional economic anthropological theory and practice theory. This perspective has certainly led to major results, in particular his impressive classification of ‘financial procedures’ but it also leaves some puzzles unsolved. One of these puzzles concerns the pig feast, which is the most complex but also most frequent exchange on Rossel Island. The feast is in fact an exchange between a ‘pig owner’ and a ‘pig eater’, each with their own network of contributors and participants. In order to ‘pay’ for the pig, the group of the pig eater enters a series of incremental shell exchanges to produce a number of top ranking shells of the required value. These shells, plus a large number of low ranking ones, are given to the pig owner and his group. However, the pig owner can not be certain about the ownership of these shells, as they are not seen as straight payment for the meat received. “The meat doesn’t really square the shells” Liep concludes and calls this surprising (p. 279). In particular the high ranking shells can be demanded back and substituted by lower ranking ones—or not be replaced at all—when the pig eaters need these shells for other exchange activities. Liep is perplexed: “This state of affairs thus presents a further puzzle. Why do men as the recipients of payments accept such erosion of their wealth? How can men who have agreed to participate in the assembly of a payment and eaten the pork handed over to them at the feast later default on their involvement and take back their contribution?” (p. 317) These are pressing questions indeed, but only, as I will argue, if one employs a strictly monetary perspective.

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If one, alternatively, would see the pig feast not primarily as a matter of exchanging money for meat, but as a mutual acknowledgement and assertion of social relations and personhood, the whole thing appears to make more sense. In particular the aspect of making relations manifest or apparent is of utmost relevance here. Following Marilyn Strathern (1988: 274) and Alfred Gell’s (1999: 37) rendering of her insights, one could argue that exchange is about making social relations visible. Normally, social relations are not visibly manifest, but during an orchestrated exchange event they are made to appear for the involved parties and also for others. Liep points himself to the importance of display for making the hierarchical relations visible: “The scaled payment constitutes a characteristic concrete representation of hierarchy or differentiation. When shells are lined up in order of rank, the precedence of both the contributors and the recipients of the various shell-ranks is displayed.” (p. 298) Thus the material lay-out of the shell prestations is a representation of the relations involved in the particular exchange, making visible their relative value and importance. Taking part in a pig feast is thus not just a matter of getting pork for money. Rather it is a matter of being seen and acknowledged in public as a person. This display of agency and personal relations is the value that is realised through the feast and is probably the major motivation for the participants. Therefore it becomes more understandable that the shells can be reclaimed again to enter into new manifestations of personhood and agency.1 In my view such a NME type of analysis would give a fuller and thus more adequate explanation of the pig feast and would suggest answers to the remaining puzzles that a monetary perspective cannot fully solve. Having come to the end of my comments, I would like to underline how much pleasure and insight the reading of Liep’s book has given me. It is a great book because of its detailed documentation of a very complex exchange system, its stringent and lucid analysis, and its inspiring contribution to anthropological theory.

NOTE ...... 1 Carrier and Carrier (1991: 162–185) give a very fine analysis of the importance of material displays of gifts as representations of social relationships. Their case is Ponam society in Manus, Papua New Guinea. Munn (1992) provides crucial insight into how the act of exchange itself creates value and her ethnographic case is Gawa, a society in the Massim, the same region of which Rossel Island is a part.

REFERENCES ...... Appadurai, Arjun 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value. In A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Armstrong, Wallace E. 1928. Rossel Island: An Ethnological Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice (transl. Richard Nice). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1990. The Logic of Practice (transl. Richard Nice). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Carrier, A. H. and J. G. Carrier 1991. Structure and Process in a Melanesian Society: Ponam’s Progress in the Twentieth Century. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers. Dalton, George 1965. Primitive Money. American Anthropologist 67 (1): 44–65.

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Douglas, Mary 1967. Primitive Rationing: A Study in Controlled Exchange. In R. Firth (ed.), Themes in Economic Anthropology. London: Tavistock. Dumont, Louis 1977. From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Dumont, Louis 1986. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Fortune, Reo 1932. Sorcerers of Dobu. London: Routledge. Gell, Alfred 1999. Strathernograms, or the Semiotics of Mixed Metaphors. In Eric Hirsch (ed.), The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. London: Athlone Press. Gregory, C. A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. London: Academic Press. Jenkins, Richard 1992. Pierre Bourdieu. London & New York: Routledge. Liep, John 1995. Rossel Island Valuables Revisited. The Journal of the Polynesian Society 104 (2): 159–180. Meggitt, Mervyn J. 1974. “Pigs Are Our Hearts!” The Te Exchange Cycle Among the Mae Enga of New Guinea. Oceania 44: 165–203. Munn, Nancy D. 1992 [1986]. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Strathern, Marilyn 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiner, Annette B. 1992 Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press.

TON OTTO, Ph.D. PROFESSOR UNIVERSITY OF AARHUS [email protected]

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS ON A PAPUAN PLUTORCACY: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND

· JOHN LIEP ·

Reciprocity and the noble Indian: response to Joel Robbins

While my general idea of ranked exchange has not overly occupied the reviewers, my critique of the principle of reciprocity and gift theory has been more provocative of intervention. These are central tenets of exchange theory and my argument, if it stands, would seriously destabilise cherished convictions. Some damage control could therefore be expected to be put into effect. One strategy would be to congratulate me for having successfully explored a unique society. If the Rossel Island situation were truly unique, ‘an anthropological freak’, conclusions drawn from it could then be argued to be more or less irrelevant generally.1 Another strategy is to dam and contain the power play of shell money finance into a limited area and thereby diminish its scope. In the rest of social life there would be reciprocity and generosity as usual. Joel Robbins uses both ploys, but the former only in a small way. I shall concentrate on the latter.

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Robbins raises a valid and relevant problem. He admits that the shell money system is indisputably hierarchical in design, but that I ‘stand too much on the side of ranked exchange itself’ as seen through the eyes of the big men on Rossel. He deftly points out that I in fact report several instances of instituted reciprocity and symmetry in exchange. This is the case in the exchange relationship between affines (after the large and unilateral bridewealth), in the preference for patrilateral marriage, in affinal mortuary payments and in delayed reciprocal pig-feasting. Finally, reciprocity and generosity exists in everyday exchanges in the domestic domain. So there seems no doubt that at certain levels reciprocal symmetry is “deliberately aimed at” on Rossel as I say myself (p. 11). In fact, in an earlier paper (Liep 1989) mentioned by Robbins I argued that these strategies of reciprocity counteract a structure of hierarchy and thus equality of rank between Rossel descent groups. It is for that reason, therefore, I abstained in my book from talking about hierarchy on Rossel, but used the term inequality, not to confuse the system with true hierarchies in ranked societies elsewhere. In my paper (1989) I was concerned to show how symmetry could be seen to contain what I called the “spectre of hierarchy” lurking in the Massim. I also noted, however, that while symmetry may maintain equality at one level this does not prevent inequality at another. Here I mentioned the relation between elder and younger. In this book, my focus is on aspects of inequality as they are inherent in the exchange system, in terms of big man monopoly of high-ranking shells and practices negating reciprocity to the full. Robbins argues that there is a tension between hierarchical and egalitarian values in Rossel Island social life: a more “rounded picture of Rossel life would be one that put the tension between reciprocity/equality and hierarchy at its centre, rather than focussing only on one side of the tension” (this issue: ). This is a good point. In the book I formulate it as a contradiction between ‘norm’ and ‘practice’: there are moral injunctions of reciprocity and generosity, but in practice they are often evaded (p. 310). In an exchange on ‘gaming the kula’ on ASAONET last year I used the terms ‘norm’ and ‘reality’. Several participants confirmed the frequency of cheating in the kula. Ryan Schram (a researcher at the University of Helsinki whose Ph.D. thesis was supervised by Robbins at the University of California San Diego) objected, however, to my contrast between norm and reality: the latter is not more real because it involves observed events or actions. He argued that asserting a norm in the breach is itself a part of kula practice, a very concrete action. Reciprocity and rational self-interest co-exist as values in Milne Bay [Massim] societies, he said. I am inclined to agree with this objection. There is a contradiction in Rossel exchange, a paradox that Gregory also notes here, but rather than being between norm and practice it is between two conflicting norms and two practices. Reciprocity is not only argued verbally, it is also practiced. The examples mentioned above attest to this, and big men who take the lead in all ceremonial exchanges take part in these reciprocal practices. On the other hand, ordinary village people, who often enough invoke reciprocity, may also at times appreciate a cunning trick. So when Robbins argues that there is a tension between equality and hierarchy [inequality] at the centre of Rossel life and that this could have been brought more to the fore in my analysis, he is right. When he attempts to outline a solution to the problem, however, I cannot follow him. He states correctly that “the ceremonial economy is central to Rossel Island sociality” and its currency transactions “shape marriages, funerals, and almost all the other most important social institutions of Rossel Island life” (this issue: 74). But in the last part of his

100 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND essay he, nevertheless, attempts to sever the ranked exchange of shell money from the very same institutions it mediates. Here, he takes inspiration from Simon Harrison’s (1985) argument that, in the Sepik society of Avatip, an elaborate hierarchy involving gender relations is in existence, but restricted to the men’s house and initiation institution. In domestic life, outside this male ritual sphere, secular equality between men and women reigns. The first step in Robbins’ ligatory technique is to dismiss as “mostly impressionistic” (this issue: 79) the dimensions of big man power I report in Chapter Four, especially the ritual and occult knowledge which make them respected and sometimes feared. The second step is that he depicts ceremonial exchange on Rossel as “an enormous shell game” promulgated by the big men, but “there is little power hidden underneath the shells”. Ceremonial exchange, he suggests, only “touches marriages, mortuary payments, pig feasts”. These institutions “cut themselves loose from it by going on to realize values of reciprocity and symmetry that are its antithesis”. (this issue: 79) This will not do. A classification should ‘carve at the joint’ as Plato said. But Robbins hacks away where there is no joint (at least metaphorically): at the backbone of Rossel society. Ceremonial exchange on Rossel Island is not, as the Avatip male cult, an institution barred to women and the uninitiated and apart from the rest of social life. It is at the heart of social reproduction, the prestige economy of pig feasts and the acquisition of status properties such as houses and canoes. Big men make themselves indispensable in the organisation of these ritual exchanges which are so complex that only they may direct them. They also exert the power to ban modern money from bridewealth and mortuary payments. Shell money finance is not some fantasy game floating above the institutions it permeates. At the end of the paper Robbins appeals to Pierre Clastres, whom I had thought consigned to oblivion. This was almost touching for me, for in the already mentioned essay of mine I did in fact briefly refer to Clastres’ Society against the State (1977 [1974]).2 In the late 1970s Clastres had been hot stuff for a short period in my department in Copenhagen. I referred to his thesis that acephalous societies are constituted to negate coercive hierarchy in connection with the levelling effect of reciprocity in Rossel Island mortuary exchanges. But advances in Amazonian archaeology and history, as well as anthropological critique, soon undermined his anarchist thesis of the powerless Amazonian chief and the society against the state. Extensive archaeological research together with studies of early chronicles of the European conquest have established that in considerable areas of the Amazon region dense populations lived in large village societies connected in regional political confederacies with ritual centres, political centralisation and elite exchange of prestige goods (Castro 1996; Heckenberger and Neves 2009). A process of devolution did take place in this region (as it did for other reasons in island Melanesia). Contemporary Amazonian Indian societies are fugitive remnants of decimated populations after the upheaval of the conquest. As Descola writes in a critique of Clastres: “The present egalitarianism is not the fruit of a collective will, tenacious to oppose the emergence of coercive power, but in fact the effect of a profound destructuration of the social tissue, sapped by demographic dismemberment, extreme pillaging, military violence and expulsion into inhospitable isolation” (1988, my translation). In fact Clastres had his theory readymade before he even went to South America for the first time in 1963. His essay on the philosophy of Indian chieftainship (incorporated as Chapter Two in Society against the State) was first published in L’Homme in 1962. The

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Ache Guayaki, amongst whom he conducted his first fieldwork, had before the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century lived a relatively settled, agrarian existence in eastern Paraguay. They suffered attacks by professional slavers and, at the turn of the twentieth century, the advancing frontier forced them to retreat into more inaccessible forest areas. As the forests were clear cut by mining, timber and cattle companies, the Ache gave up and sought ‘protection’ on the farm of a former Indian hunter where they were resettled. They were now “wasted by tuberculosis, despair and depression” and when Clastres arrived they “had dwindled to around a hundred people, and their culture appeared to loom precariously close to the edge of annihilation” (Dean 1999). It would seem that his experiences amongst them would form a poor basis for pronouncing on the essence of Indian political philosophy, but Clastres did not see fit to moderate an already formed conclusion. He elaborated it in Society against the State. Dean accuses him of “ahistoricism, rhetorical romanticism, and museumification” (1999). Robbins concludes that in the same way as Amazonian Indian societies, according to Clastres’ ‘classic’ piece, have posited chiefs to stand outside society, the people on Rossel Island have allowed big men to live out their “fantasies” of power, playing their financial game while the rest of the population live their lives in equality (this issue: 79). I find his interpretation misleading. Robbins is enthralled with the romantic primitivism I dissociate myself from in my book (p. 9), but which was also close to my heart when I was younger. Alas, it is now many years since I bade Clastres adieu.

Commendation and recrimination: response to Chris Gregory

Gregory’s critique is a collage of strong reactions: lavish praise, resentful polemics, inspired guesswork and grumpy policing of conceptual boundaries. One is consequently drawn in very different directions when making a response to it. Any writer would be thrown into delight and gratitude reading Gregory’s elevated praise in his introduction. I cannot but fully agree with his opinion here. His reception of my identification of the importance of the notion of ‘sides’ in Rossel exchange, something similar to what he has found in India, is also rewarding. I would, however, not myself characterize a Rossel side as ‘ego-centric’ in opposition to the ‘socio-centric’ clan. This is because a side is generated with point of departure in a (sub)clan group, not in an individual ego. It is no kindred. There are a number of other issues in my book which Gregory appreciates and follows up with interesting suggestions for further research. Most of them concern kinship problems, an area of special interest to him and one where he commands a much wider comparative knowledge than I do. Although I take some interest in kinship and possess a certain amount of data from Rossel I am not a specialist in this field and I cannot contribute much to these suggestions. Nevertheless, of my three critiques he is, as an economic anthropologist, the one closest to me in disciplinary interests and outlook. It is the more regrettable that most of my response must be taken up with polemics. Gregory has taken offence of the words “Marxist dogma” and “absurd” in a brief critique of his book Gifts and Commodities (1982) in my introduction. This comes in a critical review of the history of exchange theory in relation to my research. After having criticized Malinowski’s principle of reciprocity I proceed with a brief review of Mauss’ theory of the

102 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND gift where expressions such as “brilliant and inspired” are followed by “confusing” and “seriously misleading”, the last with regard to the obligation to return gifts (p. 8). I don’t show by examples that ‘there is often no obligation to return a gift’, but I refer to Testart’s ‘devastating critique’ (1998). Then follows the passage where I criticise Gregory’s version of gift theory.

Mauss (…) left a legacy that (…) led on to the dogma of Marxist scholars, of whom Gregory (1982) is the most prominent. Gregory argues that the gift is ontologically inalienable because it carries the guarantee of its return. Here he has been followed by Marilyn Strathern in her influential book The Gender of the Gift (1988: 161). The phenomenon of inalienability is important, as we shall see, but to hold that all gifts are so by nature is absurd. This has been argued by several authors [I here refer to critiques by Thomas, Gell, Carrier and two papers of my own].3 Clearly things are often transferred into the control of others without the original owner being in a position to exercise any claim to them. (p. 8–9)

I must provide a bit of background to this passage. Gifts and Commodities is now an almost thirty-year old work. In the wake of the youth rebellion of 1968, students in many countries took to Marxism. In anthropology they threw also themselves into the study of Marx and Engels. It sounds strange today that students of anthropology would pore for months and years over the turgid volumes of Capital and Grundrisse for guidance in understanding rural populations of third world countries. But in the social sciences many during those years shared the belief that profound insight about society could be won by building on the nineteenth century founders of Marxism.4 When I went out to Papua New Guinea in 1971 to do fieldwork on Rossel I brought with me the slim volume by Emmanuel Terray on the lineage mode of production in West Africa.5 It was a disappointment, however, to find that is was of no use in this society where descent groups were not corporate units in production. When Gifts and Commodities was published I had already returned from my third sojourn on Rossel. Gregory’s book was another product of the fairly short era of Marxist anthropology. For a period after its publication he became prominent in the small band of Marxist scholars in Melanesian studies (including Godelier, Damon, Feil, Modjeska). Gregory’s argument was squarely based on Marx’s writings supplemented with Morgan, Mauss and Lévi-Strauss. His conception of the social structure of PNG societies was taken from the ‘gentile society’ of Morgan’s 110-year old book about kinship systems (1871) and his Ancient Society (1877). It was based on the exogamous clan (gens), a corporate group whose members were supposed to hold property in common (Gregory 1982: 12, 17). Morgan’s early version of ‘primitive society’ became the basis for the vision of Urkommunismus of Marx and Engels. Gregory proceeded by deducing the properties of the commodity according to Marx and went on to derive those of the gift as a strict inversion of the commodity. As commodity exchange was the exchange of alienable things between transactors in a state of reciprocal independence, gift exchange became, by his logic of dialectics, the exchange of inalienable things between persons in a state of reciprocal dependence. “An inalienable thing that is given away must be returned. Thus a gift creates a debt that has to be repaid.” (Gregory 1982: 19) This was because “in a clan-based society, where there is no private property, people do not have alienable rights over things” (ibid. 18). This meant that there is an indissoluble bond between the producer and his product. Gregory here referred to “the

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 103 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND inalienable nature” of gifts (ibid. 18, 20; my emphasis). He now rejects having ever “claimed that gifts are ‘ontologically inalienable’” (this issue: 85). I admit that he didn’t use the o- word, but it seems to me that he came very close. My phrasing is thus hardly “the polar opposite of truth”. On the basis of the background provided here, nor do I feel that the term ‘dogma’ is much out of the way. With regard to Marilyn Strathern, Gregory asserts that “the idea that my historically-informed method has anything in common with [her] ahistorical ‘controlled fictions’ (…) is simply false” (this issue: 85). He refers to a different page in The Gender of the Gift (1988: 18) but, in fact, Strathern here says: “The contrast sustained in this book is taken directly from Gregory’s (1982) work.” While Strathern and I both talk about his theory, he deftly refers to his method which is a different thing. For my part, Gregory’s abstract logical construction of the concept of the gift was a stumbling block to analysis. My material was replete with information about unpaid debts, forced substitution of shells of inferior value to former recipients of high-ranking shells, and evasion of returns of loans.6 His straitjacket of a framework was in defiance of my data and his premises appeared to me to be fundamentally wrong. Here I have provided some background to why I said what I said. Was it too strong language to use the word ‘absurd’? The reader may decide. I could have said ‘seriously misleading’ instead, except that I had already said that about Mauss. And it would hardly have satisfied Gregory either. I was more impressed by Gregory’s insistence on historical awareness, by his discussion of the interaction of gift and commodity economies in PNG, and by his drawing attention to the paradox of the efflorescence of gift exchange in the face of encroaching capitalism. These elements have contributed to my thinking. If I have omitted to do so in my book I would like to credit him here. Except for Maurice Godelier (1999), there are not many anthropologists who like Ann- ette Weiner’s concept of “inalienable possessions” (1992). This is also the case with Grego- ry who of course prefers his own conception of inalienability. There are good reasons why others have been critical. Weiner had a tendency to reify what she called inalienable possessions, to make them the cause of those social relations which would rather have produced them. She defined inalienable possessions in a way that emphasized their isolation from exchange but, nevertheless, used the notion for example about high-ranking kula valuables that do circulate, although they may ‘sit’ with a possessor for decades before a new transfer is arranged. Her feminism made her believe that if women in the Pacific produced so-called cloth wealth they also controlled its exchange. Her approach was, as Gregory says, ahistorical and uninterested in change. Nevertheless, I found Inalienable Possessions liberating for my thinking because of Weiner’s idea that certain valuable possessions may, through time, come to document the history and status of a line of owners. They may become sacralized and in the end authorize the owner’s pre-eminent social position. They have to be kept in the lineage and barred from exchange. They thus become symbols of distinction and difference from others. Weiner added that other less valuable things, which partook of the ‘aura’ of inalienable possessions, would be given in exchange (1992: 10, 37). Her theory of exchange thus suggested a limited zone of inalienability in a wider field of gift exchange where alienation was a possibility. This approach fit the Rossel Island situation like a glove (indeed, better than most of Weiner’s own cases). Here the sacred high-ranking ndap are truly inalienable while lower-ranking shells are exchanged in replacement (another Weiner concept) for them. It

104 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND gave me the inspiration to make sense of my data. For Gregory this is a “curious choice” because he finds her notion of ‘keeping-while-giving’ contradictory (this issue: 86). He seems to believe that for Weiner the same things are both kept and given. This is certainly a misunderstanding. Inalienable possessions are kept while it is lesser valuables that are given. For my part Weiner’s idea of inalienable possessions was very useful although there is much of her thinking I do not accept. I believe that many of those who have distanced themselves from Weiner have taken her too literally and thrown away the grains with the chaff. Gregory takes me to task for my use of concepts. He intimates that I am muddled about terms such as ‘hierarchy’, ‘rank’, ‘inequality’ and ‘stratification’. I think this is unfair. I use ‘rank’ about a distinct social class of the population in a society. A rank is part of a ‘rank order’.7 The latter is also a ‘hierarchy’, although when I speak of hierarchy I include a chiefly system. A hierarchy involves social inequality, but the latter may also exist in societies without rank and hierarchy. Thus I talk about hierarchy in the chiefly, ranked societies of Polynesia and Micronesia while I use the more elastic term ‘inequality’ in Melanesia, except in the minority of societies there which possess chiefs and ranked groups (such as the Trobriands). I never use ‘rank’ or ‘hierarchy’ about descent group structure on Rossel because it is not a society of ranked groups. I have chosen to apply the term ‘stratification’ in the last chapter of my book to outline a more diffuse, ‘class-like’ differentiation of people in terms of the ownership and control of shell money and their exchange on Rossel Island. I believe that readers will have no difficulty in following the discussions in my book. The sentence Gregory quotes as an example of my confusion most people would read without lifting an eyebrow. He lectures on the correct meaning of these concepts. But there is no generally accepted use of concepts in the social sciences. Gregory’s definitions are of course not authorized definitions, just the ones he prefers himself. When he thus declares that “Rank, hierarchy and stratification are cross-cutting orderings of people found in all societies” (this issue: 89), he is free to do so if he finds it useful. But I am as free to disagree. The last chapter already appears to be the most provocative part of my book. Although the main theme of my monograph is ranked exchange and the special Rossel Island version of it, the question of power also runs like a red thread through the book. A whole chapter is concerned with dimensions of power in seniors’ secular and ritual knowledge, in the fear of sorcery and in the multitude of taboos surrounding women’s lives. In my analyses of exchange institutions I repeatedly touch on how power is appropriated and maintained through the control of shell money. In the conclusion of the book I return to the problem of power in Rossel Island society. I sketch a profile of social stratification where a minority of big men dominate the rest of the population through their ownership of high-ranking shells, their superior control of exchange and their monetary manipulations. This kind of hegemony I have chosen to call a plutocracy: an “influential class of wealthy people” (COD 1964). Gregory objects that the title of my book is a misnomer. The idea of a plutocracy “is not fully developed”, the evidence is “anecdotal”, the “data is unconvincing” (this issue: 90). There is some basis for such a view when the eye that looks is a stern and rigorous one. Indeed, the last part of my conclusion is tentative or experimental. Gregory would have preferred that I restrict my theme more narrowly to ranked exchange. Plutocracy “would

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 105 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND be another book”. But my aim has been to explore also the contexts and consequences of the Rossel version of ranked exchange, as far as my material and imagination would take me—in this book. What happened in this indigenous society where a monetary instrument became the key medium in the practice of social relations? The title Plutocracy is evocative of this manifestation of big man power. It is also provocative as a contrast to the prevalent picture of traditional Melanesian leadership and exchange. The subtitle more specifically indicates the main topic of the content. Such an arrangement of titles is not all that unusual. Gregory would prefer it the other way round and with a question mark. That would strictly be more correct. But it would be much less effective on the cover of a book.

Time and the missing person: response to Ton Otto

Ton Otto approves my ethnography and in general also my approach from practice theory. He is also the only one of my three reviewers who accepts my idea of plutocracy, which is encouraging. He takes up two issues where he suggests that alternative theories to those I have already employed would throw new light on our understanding of Rossel exchange. This is always welcome in that it challenges one to consider the argument once more from new viewpoints. Otto cunningly arrests me for accusing “classical exchange theory” of an underlying reflection of “Western economic ideology” and goes on to point out that my practice theory “has roots in Marxism and Western economic thinking” (this issue: 93). I am happy to declare that I did not use the term ‘Western’ in this connection. I talked about capitalist market ideology. A favourite pastime of Western anthropologists is Western-bashing. We work in Western universities, publish in Western languages in Western journals and our interests are regularly inspired by Western issues and debates. Still, we habitually critique one or the other theory for being Western. I call for a truce in this uncivil war. It is time we admit that all our theories are ‘Western’. This is also the case with the notions of ‘time’ and ‘personhood’, which Otto takes up here. Otto argues that my “historical-middle-range-practice theory” is insufficient to explain monetary exchanges on Rossel. For a fuller picture, he says, we need a theoretical perspective that takes in personhood and agency to answer questions such as: how plutocrats could persuade the rest of society to accept the hierarchy of ranked exchange; why shells have received so much respect; why people would believe they were empowered by the spirits of cannibal victims, etc. (this issue: 94) Here I agree with Edmund Leach, who once argued that “the ‘why’ questions posed by ethnography are always unanswerable (…) the only answer is historical” (1983: 530). This is the answer I have attempted to outline in my book. Otto’s last question in this sequence, on what the relation of the shell money is to social value and personal worth, demands further consideration. I shall return to that. Armstrong’s theory about shell money supposed that the value relationship between ranks of shells depended on compound interest. The value of a shell of a certain rank was determined by the length of time the shell had to be on loan for a shell of the next higher rank to be returned. It was a strictly logical and elegant theory, but it was utterly wrong, as my investigations soon revealed. Otto now suggests that my rejection of Armstrong’s idea of time has led me to disregard the central role of time in Rossel exchange processes. He

106 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND first refers to Bourdieu’s critique of the synchronic structuralist model of reciprocity (1977: 4 ff.). It disregards the fact, Bourdieu argues, that for agents exchange is experienced as irreversible because it unfolds over time. Bourdieu, influenced by game theory, looks upon exchange as a game where the timing of gifts and countergifts is of strategic importance. His point did not overly impress me when I read it. His emphasis on strategy in exchange was valuable but I was on my way to develop a more radical critique of the principle of reciprocity whereas he seemed to accept that it worked out in the long run. Timing is also the issue in the (constructed) case collected in the Dobu area of the Massim by Fortune that Otto quotes (this issue: 95). This was the first time ‘gaming’ in the kula was reported, but Fortune was not in doubt that reciprocity in the end would be respected. The new wave of Massim anthropologists in the 1970s were the first to report ‘dirty gaming’ where inexperienced kula men are regularly stripped from their valuables. On Rossel Island big men are frequently reproached for delaying repayment of shell loans for months or years, if they do it at all. Time of course plays a role here. I am, however, uncomfortable with Otto’s suggestion that delay “creates value for the person who is able to enforce such a delay” (this issue: 95). It is not entirely clear what is meant by ‘value’ here. Is it additional shell value at his disposal, or is it the value of enhancement of his person and format as a big man? Both elements are to some degree true, but no new value in terms of shell money is produced. If big men regularly employ the strategy of delay it means that they are able to move shells about in exchanges with a greater velocity than lesser men. If one wants to be high-brow one can say that they profit from time compression. This does not mean that a big man accumulates shells in his basket; he puts them into action in as many exchange rituals as possible. Another instance of timing has to do with the high-ranking ndap which are the inalienable possessions of their big-man owners, but are necessary as deposits to authorize important exchange rituals. As Otto rightly points out (and I also mention in my book p. 182) this gives the big men influence over the timing of these exchange events. One may say that they control time better than others. Still, major exchange rituals are so complex and involve so many actors and their networks that random mishaps often upset planning. Otto moves on to invoke time as a factor in the superior value of ndap shells of the two highest divisions (not only the very highest) of sacred, ancient shells with a name and history. Here we have to do with time as historical duration, la longue durée. But this would be a very different notion of time than timing. And it is not really of importance in this context. Mere age does not produce high value. I can say this because there is a group of low-rank ndap which, although regarded as ancient and made by the gods like the inalienable high-ranking shells, have no names, circulate freely with other low-ranking shells and are not very valuable (p. 82–83). I suggest that the superior value of high- ranking shells is not mainly a consequence of their having been about ‘long time’ but because generations of big men of yore invested them with myths, displayed and exchanged them at important events and lent them the renown of their personalities. Time as an explanatory concept does not seem to apply here. All things considered, I find that time is hardly of the central importance that Otto wants to give it. Otto is surprised that I have refrained from entering the trail in Melanesian exchange studies blazed by the New Melanesian Ethnography (NME). I only touch it lightly in a footnote referring to The Gender of the Gift and why I could not use that work as a point of

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 107 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND departure. Otto is puzzled that I missed the opportunity to draw on this alternative to what he calls my individualistic practice theory and narrow monetary perspective. My approach is too grounded in ‘traditional economic anthropology’. I could have improved my analysis by exploring how exchange makes social relations appear, for example in the pig feast. I would then have been able to show how the display of shells ordered after rank is a representation of the value and relative importance of the participants. Those who take part in a pig feast display their agency by being seen and acknowledged. (this issue: 97) Otto’s challenge forces me into a zone of ‘overgrown paths’8 that I am reluctant to tread again. But I shall return to that below. In academic life each generation has its favourite paradigm. It provides you a certain vision of how things link up with each other in a complex world. It becomes a foundation, a source of motivation and a set of keys to problems you learn to find interesting. Each new paradigm is developed in opposition to the one it sets out to replace. A new paradigm demands that you accept a new perspective, a new conceptual vocabulary and a new academic style. It must be a difficult one that promises to lead to deep and hitherto undiscovered insights. You must learn to inhabit your paradigm and to some degree make it a part of your identity. As years go by and new paradigms compete, most of us find that one must make a choice: is all that mental struggle worth it once again? During my undergraduate years I was introduced to classic British social anthropology. When we read Fredrik Barth’s Models of Social Organisation (1966) some of us found his generative and processional approach path-breaking. It constituted a new paradigm and we struggled hard to understand Models. My practice theory is in fact derived from Barth. Bourdieu’s Outline (1977) was largely Barth with a frosting of pretentious verbiage, I found. Being on the left, I made economic and political anthropology, both prominent branches of the discipline in the late 60s and the 70s, my major interests. I am at bottom an economic anthropologist. After Marxism, with the hype of Culture, neo-liberalism and its intellectual child post-modernism, economic anthropology has become old hat. Otto is kind to say ‘traditional’. The crash of 2008 will, I predict, mean a renaissance for this subfield. When I returned to my department from fieldwork, Marxism was in its heyday. I spent some years learning to grasp the heavy German thinking of Marx and Engels and the growing literature of Marxist anthropology. I slowly realised that it was of small use for me. From then on I became aware that I would have to be selective in my choice of new paradigms. For my own part I always try to express myself as plainly as possible. When key texts for a new paradigm become too abstruse I step off the wagon. This is my major problem with the magnificent school of NME. From Roy Wagner’s first theoretical book (1975) I picked one morsel I could understand and benefit from (p. 4). The rest of Wagner’s theoretical oeuvre is a closed book to me. I am loath to criticize Marilyn Strathern. She has been kind to me.9 This is one reason why I only referred to The Gender of the Gift in a footnote. But provoked by Otto I must admit that I had great difficulties in making sense of the book. I read it one-and-a-half times. Every few lines I thought ‘this is interesting’, but by the next page she had lost me. I had a major problem with her point of departure in Gregory’s definition of the gift as inalienable.10 As was Gregory himself, I was astounded that she took no account of the interplay of gift and commodity exchange in PNG. Her lack of interest in change was also disappointing. Further, I prefer materialism to idealism. I look at problems from bottom up. When scholars go the other way and only take departure in

108 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND beliefs and symbols I am sceptical.11 As I see it, NME is another version of symbolic anthropology. I am uncomfortable also with the notion of personhood, especially the idea that there is a ’Melanesian person’ but no Melanesian individuals. The person, we are told, is partible or relational, a cross-point of social relations. This is not what I experienced on Rossel Island. Here people had a clear notion that other individuals had their own ‘mind’, propensities and interests. The same has been reported from other areas of Melanesia (A. Strathern 1981; Kuehling 2005). Of course, in face-to-face village societies people are more entangled in binding social relations, more collective, as an earlier age would say, but they also possess some autonomy. This is the same with our own societies although the ratio may be different. NME is a prime example of alterization. It must be acknowledged that for Strathern her argument was, as Gregory reminds us, an intellectual experiment in ‘controlled fiction’ and her ‘Melanesia’ was created as a foil for criticizing feminist anthropology. She can hardly be responsible that others have taken her constructions for the final word on Melanesian personhood. Thus Mosko (2000) in his acid attempt to demolish Weiner’s concept of inalienable possessions proclaims that it runs counter to the ‘canonical’ principle of reciprocity as well as “prevailing views of Melanesian personhood” [i.e. Strathern’s], and “well-founded understandings of Melanesian sociality” (Mosko 2000: 378). There is yet another more disturbing element in my encounter with NME. In 1989 I went out to Rossel Island after an absence of ten years. This was to be a brief revisit of two- and-a-half months on my way to Canberra to visit the Austronesian research project at the Australian National University. It turned out to become my last stay on Rossel. I had planned an investigation of nutrition including a study of the social cosmology of the body. I hoped to discover some nice structure connecting gender relations, food flows, body parts and kinship exchanges. This was indeed a project influenced by Strathern’s ideas, in the main inspired by her more easily comprehensible article on marriage exchanges (1984). My research during this sojourn did not come off well. In short, despite all my collection of information about these matters, no overall pattern seemed to emerge in my data. Further, I began to realize that my time slot was too short and that deeper understanding probably demanded a fluency in the extremely difficult Rossel language that I never acquired. Then followed a severe malaria attack and its treatment, and a traumatic death in the hamlet where I stayed. With a rising feeling of looming failure, anxiety grew and became generalised. I had to leave the island two weeks before time.12 The question of whether this failure was due to my own inadequacy or whether my quest for grand structure had been a wild goose chase haunted me for some years. For my own peace of mind I have settled for the latter option. Otto arrests a comment of mine that on Rossel people ‘get a share in’ a girl they have provided with food and this is a basis for claiming bridewealth (this issue: 97). I say that this is a ‘Rossel labour theory of value’ (I put it in inverted commas in the text) and suggested that it may be influenced by the experience of commodity labour and exchange. This may not be one of my brightest ideas but I think that Otto takes me too literally. It is a ‘labour theory of value’ in the same sense as it is a ‘theory of exploitation’ when Andes Indians suspect whites of kidnapping people and stealing their body fat to lubricate their machines. The Rossels have a clear concept of ‘work’ and assert that the drudgery of gardening is ‘heavy work’ (as is making ceremonial exchanges). The suggestion about

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 109 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND commodity experience is less robust, but in the early 1970s Rossel men had worked as contract labourers on the local European plantation for a number of generations and traded copra for money. There were small local trade stores in every village. People were conversant with paid labour and commodity consumption. In the book I report how young men, who were critical of the big-man control over the inalienable high-ranking ndap and ranked exchange in general, said that when all the big men had died they would change the system so that exchange became just ‘like [in a] store’. They had also experimented with a commercial form of pig feast where meat was exchanged for shells and modern money (see below). So commodity ideas have influenced conceptualizations of labour, food and rights in people, but in this case it is more likely that the latter go farther back in time. Otto cannot understand why it is a puzzle for me that big men often contribute big kê at a pig feast and receive big lumps of pork only to demand the shells back without prior agreement later. He objects that he pig feast is not primarily concerned with exchanging money for meat. If I had understood that the pig feast is really about acknowledging social relations and personhood everything would have made sense. According to Otto the shells are there to represent the value of personhood and agency. (this issue: 98) But it is a part of the puzzle that the recipients actually resent these withdrawals and are disappointed at being unable to keep the big shells. I mentioned above that there is a version of pig- feasting called ‘paying pig like store’ where high-ranking shells are dispensed with and meat paid for with shells and state money (p. 281). But the big men strongly oppose it. There are many dimensions in the pig feast. One of them is that persons or, as I prefer, identities are on stage, as are the strengths or weaknesses of their relationships. But this aspect is not entirely overlooked in my book. On the bridewealth paying ritual, for example, I say, after having described the atmosphere of complaints and quarrelling typical of this occasion:

the shell money is differentiated on a qualitative scale and (…) what one receives is an index of how others estimate one, as well as acknowledging one’s former prestations on their behalf. The occasion thus becomes a scene for the construction of selves and identities, which may turn into a ‘site of struggle’, where the reputation and self-esteem of actors is at stake. A plea for recognition is therefore hardly distinguishable from a greed for money. (p. 230)

What more does Otto want? I think that if I had said ‘agent’ instead of ‘actor’ and ‘personhood’ instead of ‘identity’ and had rigged up a couple of references to NME texts he would have been more than satisfied. For my own part, the New Melanesian Ethnography has been an excellent school for me to stay away from.13

NOTES ...... 1 I did not put it, as Robbins says, that Rossel Island money is “an anthropological freak”. I said that Armstrong’s erroneous interpretation did so. And that is a different thing. 2 This essay was in fact already written in 1981. Due to delays in publication it was printed only in 1989. 3 As far as I remember, none of them, however, went so far as to use the word ‘absurd’. 4 I did that myself, but must say that for me Marxism in the end had no more to offer than the notion

110 Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2009 FORUM: RANKED EXCHANGE ON ROSSEL ISLAND of historical specificity and the concept of social reproduction. I was a socialist (I still am) and was at first positive towards Marx’s work, but I later became convinced that his theories, now of course much outdated, were mainly relevant only for a critique of industrial capitalism. 5 Mine was in a Swedish translation published two years earlier than the English (1972). 6 In my book I quote similar evidence from a number of Pacific societies to show that the practice of Rossel exchange is not an aberrant case (p. 318–319). 7 I further use ‘rank’ about position in an order of precedence as, for example, the ‘rank’ of a category of Rossel Island shell money. Occasionally, I refer to the whole system of ndap ranks as a ‘hierarchy’. 8 On Overgrown Paths was the title of Knut Hamsun’s last novel written in his old age. 9 After having heard a paper on ‘Gift exchange and the construction of identity’ (at the Helsinki conference ‘Culture and history in the Pacific’ in early 1987), Strathern invited me to the renowned workshop on ‘Big men and great men’ she organized with Maurice Godelier in Paris later the same year. 10 Otto leaves some doubt whether my reading of Strathern is correct. He didn’t follow up my reference to Strathern (1988: 161) in the footnote. I quote “Here is the crucial factor that makes it impossible to speak of alienations in the Gift economy (…) Inalienability signifies the absence of a property relation.” She explicitly refers to Gregory in this paragraph. 11 I make an exception with Lévi-Strauss, whom I regard as the greatest anthropologist of the twentieth century. 12 Otto knows well my condition on arrival in Canberra, because we shared offices at the department. 13 This is a paraphrase of a Hemingway joke (1977: 77)

REFERENCES ...... Barth, Fredrik 1966. Models of Social Organization. Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper No.93. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de 1996. Images of Nature and Society in Amazonian Ethnology. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 179–200. Clastres, Pierre 1977 [1974]. Society Against the State. Oxford: Mole Editions, Basil Blackwell. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) 1964. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dean, Bartholomew 1999. Clastres’ Chronicle and the Optic of Primitivism. Anthropology Today 15 (2): 9–11. Descola, Philippe 1988. La chefferie amérindienne dans l’anthropologie politique. Revue Francaise de Science Politique 38 (5): 818–827. Godelier, Maurice 1999 [1996]. The Enigma of the Gift. Oxford: Polity Press. Gregory, Chris A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. London: Academic Press. Harrison, Simon J. 1985. Ritual Hierarchy and Secular Equality in a Sepik River Village. American Ethnologist 12 (3): 413–426. Heckenberger, Michael and Eduardo Góes Neves 2009. Amazonian Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 38: 251–266. Hemingway, Ernest 1977 [1964]. A Moveable Feast. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Triad/Panther Books. Kuehling, Susanne 2005. Dobu: Ethics of Exchange on a Massim Island, Papua New Guinea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Leach, Edmund R. 1983. The Kula: An Alternative View. In J. W. Leach and E. Leach (eds), The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liep, John 1989. The Day of Reckoning on Rossel Island. In F. H. Damon and R. Wagner (eds), Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring. Decalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press. Morgan, Lewis H. 1871. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. Morgan, Lewis H. 1877. Ancient Society. New York: Holt. Mosko, Mark 2000. Inalienable Ethnography: Keeping-While-Giving and the Trobriand Case. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 (3): 377–396.

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Strathern, Andrew J. 1981. ‘Noman’: Representations of Identity in Mount Hagen. In L. Holy and M. Stuchlik (eds), The Structure of Folk Models. London: Academic Press. Strathern, Marilyn 1984. Marriage Exchanges: A Melanesian Comment. Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 41–73. Strathern, Marilyn 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press. Terray, Emmanuel 1970 [1969]. Den historiska materialismen och de ‘primitiva samhällena’. Lund: Zenitserien. Testart, Alain 1998. Uncertainties of the ‘Obligation to Reciprocate’: A Critique of Mauss. In W. James and N. J. Allen (eds), Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute. Oxford: Berghahn. Wagner, Roy 1975. The Invention of Culture. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Weiner, Annette B. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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